Why game developers hate the Facebook-Zynga marriage, how Google+ can benefit | Hacker News Reader

Why game developers hate the Facebook-Zynga marriage, how Google+ can benefit

venturebeat.com

24 pointstilt5 comments

Is it just me or is this whole industry starting to feel increasingly sleazy? I guess it's inevitable when so much money is on the table but I don't feel as proud to call myself a developer as I did a few years ago.

I think that no matter who you are and how big you are (Facebook) you have to come out clean.

If you say that every developer has the same deal going on, no matter how much money they pump in, you should give them the same tools. If you DO think that who performs better should get better deals, as every business would, then just say so.

Playing the way they played so far (giving poor support, shutting down apps, making subtle deals, etc) do Facebook think they can really leverage developers with the HTML5 platform when they release it?

The only reason why developers want to keep working on Facebook is for their (official) userbase. Facebook knows that and they didn't do anything better than showing muscles so far.

It's true that, if you tell people you make social games, many will respond with a snide comments about your annoying games. I guess it's because the industry to becoming increasingly mainstream, so opportunists appear more often than in the past.

I kind of hate the Zynga revenue model more than anything. It doesn't seem like an ethical way to make money, and has absolutely nothing to do with any of the things that spurred me to get interested in game development in the first place.

Ironic thing about this is Zynga sees their relationship with Facebook as one of the weakness, as reported in their S1:

"Facebook is the primary distribution, marketing, promotion and payment platform for our games. We generate substantially all of our revenue and players through the Facebook platform and expect to continue to do so for the foreseeable future, the filing explains...Any deterioration in our relationship with Facebook would harm our business and adversely affect the value of our Class A common stock."

So Google+ could even benefit from working with Zynga, if they wanted to that is.

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