Zynga 'losing $150 on every new paying customer'
develop-online.net
develop-online.net
This is an obvius mistake, as not all of the 3 Million from Dec 2010 continued to be a customer in Sept 2011. I roughly assume they lost 800.000 customers in that span (i think its more), then the newly aquired customers triple to 1.2 Million. Thus Zynga makes 50$ profit per customer.
I'd go farther, if players stick around 12-15 months historically, and they had 3M users, then in 9 months they could lose 60%-75% so 1.8M to 2.25M players! This of course depends on distribution of lifespans, and assumes that the 12-15 month figure remains accurate.
If that's true, they're getting users for as cheap as $50 each, and making $100 on each.
I would have spent at least part of those $120M in funding startups to develop new games (and later bring them in, in case...). I'm pretty positive the return might have been better...
Losing more users is good in that it means they gained more in the same timespan - for fixed changes in the number of users (which is the datapoint we have). But it also means they are having a hard time keeping them.
Once they do, they're not coming back. CF:Nintendo and the wii.
I can't count the number of times I've visited people's houses with the wii unused. All the casual gamers Nintendo attracted won't be buying another system again.
So they did buy another system, one that in most ways delivered on the promise of the Wii interface better than the Wii did.
I think people expect more from them.
Also, the problem you describe exists in all entertainment industries. I don't think we've innovated much in literature since Shakespeare or in cinema since Hitchcock. But there's always some work that stand above the rest in their originality. And then a lot of other works that improve on them or at least try. I don't think that's bad.
Which is a derivative of Double Dragon (and probably something earlier), but it's a fantastic game nevertheless.
SW:TOR is definitely World of Warcraft with a Star Wars skin. It also has the most voice acting of any game in history and it is the first MMOs that actually has a story for each player character that is worth following.
Modern Warfare 3 as an expansion is now arguing semantics. What makes it an expansion? Two years of development where they didn't really innovate but they continued to tightly tune their well oiled machine and CoD Elite is a great platform that almost every game would benefit from. Is it simply price you are annoyed with because you don't perceive the incremental improvements to be worth it? Modern Warfare 3 is definitely not going to push the video games industry forward in any major ways but Modern Warfare 1 & 2 have already done that.
As another poster has stated you're confusing Castle Crashers with something else. Castle Crashers is more like Battletoads or Double Dragon or River City Ransom.
The "hardcare" video game industry is moving forward albeit slowly. The "social" video game industry seems to have stagnated already and is just rehashing their current game mechanics with new graphics.
This compares rather favorably to the video game industry, where exponential sales decay sets in after 1 to 3 weeks for almost all titles, including ones which cost more to produce than every Zynga game produced to date combined.
I don't love Zynga, but their model has a lot to recommend it over "Lets make another big-budget war movie/game with $10 million of programming, $80 million of art assets, and $120 million of launch marketing and then try to get it in front of every 18 ~ 30 year old male in America."
Rather, Zynga's game development is heavily metrics driven. They can tune their games to max out metrics, and make them stupidly addicting, and 'fun' and get their customers. But in general, you really cannot create 'new' or 'innovative', or at least in the way people like those words to mean by following the metrics. You can just create more and more polished and targeted variants of existing games.
Good god. My concern would be whether they will still be able to milk people for $150 after there are 12 step programs and "just say no to Zynga" PSAs.
I'd guess that the expected monetary value of the increased engagement of your friends due to your presence more than makes up for the cost to provide the game to you, probably by a factor of 100 or more.
The behavior that you described has been put into a basket by Zynga and mixed with the statistical behavior of average gamers in order to create their business model, where they assume that X millions of advertising and Y millions in R&D and SysOps bring Z millions in revenue, preferably with Z > X + Y.
90% of gamers are non-paying and probably do little in terms of word of mouth promotion, so they just pull these averages downwards. But, as long as, on average, Z > X + Y, everything is ok for Zynga. Because it's the only way in which they can operate without a crystal ball.
I have to say that I'm very disappointed that you block ads. Certainly it wouldn't hurt to simply ignore the ads, given that you're using their service.
For a lot of services whose ads I block it is mainly because I am already paying a fee to get access and yet I still have to be bombarded with ads. Hulu is the worst offender in that department.
because I can assure you conversion costs on FB games are way less than $300/user
sounds like crystal gazing to me.