It's the most successful social gaming company in the world. So why is everyone thrilled it's collapsing? Zynga, the social gaming juggernaut whose games are played by over 50 million people a day , may well be the most reviled big company to emerge from the frothy whirlpool of money, ego and talent that's opened up in Silicon Valley over the last few years.
As Draw Something's user numbers fell , Zynga and its ability to create hit games became subject to a whole new level of scrutiny. If there seems to be a sense of glee in the media's rush to cover Zynga's every misstep on the way to its potential collapse, that's because there is.
There doesn't seem to be a company more universally loathed — except maybe Groupon, another poster child for Silicon Valley excess, widely regarded as essentially a scam. Analysts are raising questions about whether it can make the transition from being totally dependent on Facebook to producing hit mobile games, which is where everybody — including Zynga — thinks it needs to be next. Zynga has had a particular zeal for buying talent and intellectual property, swallowing around a dozen companies in the year or so before it bought OMGPop.
While its corporate culture has an increasingly dismal reputation, a former employee of a studio that had been acquired by Zynga told me that "the staff was happy with how the acquisition went. The bigger problem, as this former employee explained, was that the company couldn't figure out how to create another hit game.
When the studio was tasked with developing a game that's now one of Zynga's top 10 biggest properties, "a lot of management was brought in from San Francisco, and there were a lot of chiefs trying to figure out how to make [the game] a hit. Mooney's comments did not go over well in the room. According to a blog post by Raph Koster, the former chief creative officer for Sony Online Entertainment and now the founder of Facebook games developer Metaplace, "he was not only booed, but someone shouted out, 'But you don't make games!
And then, just to make things even more awkward, [Mooney] started pitching Zynga as a great place to work, going so far as to directly ask for people to send in their resumes. Hey, [Mooney]: There's a time and a place for that, and your acceptance speech at the Game Developers Choice Awards is neither.
Learn some fing tact. To Ian Bogost , a professor at Georgia Tech and a founding partner of the Persuasive Games studio, it's not surprising that people like Sutphin are willing to publicly articulate their frustrations about Zynga or worry about burning bridges with the company.
Bogost said he feels that the booing at Mooney at the GDC awards event was inappropriate behavior. But he speculated that those who had such strong reactions to Mooney's speech were responding to a sense that Zynga has different priorities than others in the game developer community.
People in the community "don't seem to have a sense that [Zynga is] concerned about the kind of attitudes that people have about their games. For its part, Zynga has "the utmost respect for independent developers and their talents," said company spokesperson Shernaz Daver. Games as behaviorist experiments One of the biggest complaints aimed at Zynga from within the industry is that the company is building a giant, highly profitable business by taking others' designs and putting out their own versions.
For example, wrote Nick Saint in Business Insider, many of Zynga's games appear, on the surface at least, to be imitations of others' work. Daver responded by saying that "Unlike a hits-driven business like video games, social games have persistence and are designed and developed in that manner.
The mechanics of game design and the way one thinks of developing a social game to reach and retain users is different. In a social game, there is a constant process of iteration and innovation after the game is released, unlike console games. We continuously iterate on all our games and our users see new features from seasonal items to new cities every week. But as Koster reported from the awards ceremony, some people charge that Zynga doesn't even make games. That's a tough argument to prove, of course, and one Koster himself disputes--"Yes, Farmville is a game," Koster wrote.
But by any reasonable definition of a game, it fits perfectly. Viral growth there was unchecked. Facebook ad rates were low, so buying traffic was cheap. And most games were played on the desktop.
But soon everything changed, and Zynga never recovered. But as gaming machines got more powerful and home consoles developed, the games got more complicated and so did the controllers.
But Facebook put what was essentially a gaming console in front of millions of non-gamers. Mark Pincus recognized this and built games for a mass market. Click click click, simple tasks, something for everyone. These games are great.
He acknowledges his games would have a hard going with the critics: "I think the traditional gaming industry has been driven by a certain level of tech and fidelity that reviewers are looking for.
Until recently, my most-played game every day was a game on my iPhone. It's called Drop 7. I was obsessed with it for about two years. It's Tetris with math, but is about times more fun than that description makes it sound. The worst way of describing FarmVille or CityVille , I say to LeTourneau when I sit down with him, is as glorified chain letters that compel people to keep clicking because they feel they have to.
He tells me his wife never played games until she played FarmVille and that she would call it a game. Before we have this exchange, LeTorneau had already made a statement that most game developers don't feel the need to make at the beginning of interviews:.
I feel like I'm making games every day. I don't' feel like I'm not making games. The most important thing about these games, he says, is that they're social. For example, when I ask him if Zynga would ever making a racing game, he says, "Sure. If we do, the first thing it will be will be social.
Bob Bates started writing text-adventure games for Infocom in He wrote Sherlock and Arthur. Later, he wrote the story for the first-person shooter Unreal II. Even later, he wrote the romance plot in FrontierVille that's the game now known as Pioneer Trail and now he oversees Zynga's external development studios. Right before he worked for Zynga he was a consultant. He knew he should smarten up about social games, so he played the hot one at the time, Zynga's Mafia Wars.
Like other Zynga games, it was free to start playing, but you could pay to progress more quickly. I'm not going to pay. I'm going to sit back and I'm going to say, "Why do I want to do that? Are those two things in tension with each other? Zynga's Bates: "Usually, in our games, you can progress by waiting, you can progress by being viral or social or you can progress by paying. Kotaku: "Do any of those three things in your mind make the game more fun than if you could just have the next moment in the text adventure right away?
Bates: "Done right, the social part would. We don't always get that right. There are the Decorators, the players who will want to pay to get some of the things that make their version of the game more distinct. And they like to do that. These people want to impress you with their game world, so they might pay to make their world look cooler. And there are competitors, people driven by the performance of their friends on the game's leaderboards.
Some of these people will pay to do better. All Zynga games, Bates and anyone else who works at Zynga will remind you, can be played for free. Paying is optional. I mention Super Mario Brothers , a game I think we can assume is very good. I tell Bates that I can't imagine any free-to-play version in the Zynga sense that wouldn't in some way diminish the game.
I wonder if the free-to-play model simply disqualifies certain game designs from working well in it.
0コメント