Follow Simple Lifeforms

• RSS
• Email
• FriendFeed
• Twitter
• MySpace
• Facebook

Archive for January, 2010

Zynga and the End of the Beginning

Posted by Tadhg | Jan 2, 2010 | Filed under Social Games

Where two years ago everyone was talking about ‘casual’ games, now they’re all talking about ’social’ games. Key developers have recently attracted some very big numbers. This article is not really about Zynga itself, but rather examining what underpins their business model, the likely threats to which it must adapt and how Zynga – as standard bearer of the social game community – will likely fare in the coming year. As Zynga goes, so the rest of the social game market tends to follow.

The first thing to say is that the people running Zynga are both very smart and competitive. They have streaked ahead of all of their competition by applying a relatively simple strategy of picking up on gaming trends, copying them quickly and then maximising every avenue of Facebook to spread their message thoroughly. Zynga currently has 4 times as many monthly active players in their games as their next closest rival. To look at the distribution of players on an Appdata.com chart, you would be forgiven for thinking that there was an error in the metric reportage, such is the disparity.

It’s also important to understand something about ’social games’: Most of them are not social. They tend to be single or multi-player games that use social networks (mostly Facebook) as an easy way to drive player adoption. What the industry is calling ’social games’ are more accurately described as ‘viral games’.

The focus of most viral game developers is maximising trends. Trends rise and fall quickly in response to player boredom, retention is king, and developers spend much of their time reminding players to play, to invite their friends, to post stories from the game to their profiles, and other activity designed essentially to not let the player forget to come and play. Viral gaming relies a lot on ways to grab or nudge players’ attention. Like any third party game publisher they are reliant on the benevolence of their platform holders (primarily Facebook) and the market conditions that their platform has engendered.

This has resulted in predominantly short-term thinking. Viral game development is a battleground of very simple and usually cloned games, interruption marketing tactics, push-to-the-limit tactics to jog players into returning to play, and a lot of scrambling to be on the next trends as fast as possible. Viral game developers, such as Zynga, have little or no commitment to developing deep or rich game experiences because the market has not really rewarded that kind of activity. However that lack of depth is precisely the reason why viral gaming is showing signs of weakness typical in any runaway success.

Zynga this week received investment of $180m from DST, a Russian venture capital firm (which also owns a small share of Facebook itself), and this signals the end of something and the beginning of something else. The big question is this: Is it the beginning of the end? Or is it the end of the beginning?

Read the rest of this article on Gamasutra

[ Read More ]