YES! Zynga shall burns tonight!
On a serious note, I am glad that our entertainment future won't be afflicted with "The Curse of the Cow Clicker" and we will just get back to making genuine games.
On a serious note, I am glad that our entertainment future won't be afflicted with "The Curse of the Cow Clicker" and we will just get back to making genuine games.
Ultimately, hating on Zynga is pointless, because that mindset has infected EA, SOE, THQ and even the 'good' developers like valve[1] and blizzard.
In short, game developers have gone from small groups of nerds to large corporations run with a corporation-like efficiency. The product managers that so brutally follow analytics in the SF web dev scene are also starting to infiltrate gaming.
[1] In team fortress 2, crates drop which require you to purchase a key to open. This exact move is very common in free to play games, but as far as I know it was developed by Zynga in Mafia Wars.
Any item that effects gameplay is craftable. Uncraftable items (ie: ones you have purchase in the store or uncrate) do not affect gameplay.
Of all the "free to play" schemes, this one is the least odious.
F2P in general is based on the notion that 'if you give someone a reward for something, they will pay for more of that reward'. Alternatively, if you give someone a way to make it easier to "achieve" that reward, they will pay you to make it easier. So therefore f2p games are designed around getting you into essentially a skinner box where you get a constant rate of rewards and can either pay to make the reward process easier or you can pay to make it happen more often.
The problem with this addiction model is that it puts an incredible amount of stress on your users. These games are not inherently fun, they are just addictive. The stress leads to burn out and players quitting. This is all on a spectrum of course, I would barely categorize TF2 as using this model. Zynga games define this model.
Edit:
let me tie my last 2 paragraphs to my first. In TF2, you can either get new guns at constant periodic intervals. Or you can pay to get them in crates, which drop fairly often. This is a skinner-box/addiction model. It is a small part of TF2, but Zynga games use this as the basis of their game's design.
More and more games and using this model and fall somewhere in between Zynga and Valve. The problem is the slope towards Zynga is steep and its easy to make people buy things if you use Zyngaesque features. This benefits your company in the short term but kills it in the long term.
New weapons are introduced regularly, but the player community is very vocal about weapon balance. There are few direct upgrades. Many weapons are "crutches" in that they confer benefit to the unskilled (new) player, but experienced player often prefers the "vanilla" loadout.
The store benefits the player who doesn't want to wait to get the latest shiny object, but it doesn't significantly impact players who don't have the money.
Few companies take a fraction of the care that valve takes with their flagship title.
Age of Empires Online had to overhaul its pricing. Microsoft Flight crashed and burned (har har) after trying to sell new planes and areas bit by bit.
If Zynga does fail in a serious way, it should hasten the demise of the "social gaming" business model.