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Zynga CEO: "Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers."

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Re: Zynga CEO: "Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers."

#81

Post by prodigal_erik »

chancho wrote: post #70
teamonkey wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starbucks was/is notorious for a similar policy.

On a street where there are several Startbucks, it's wise to open up another Starbucks?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cto45fWUdJI

Last time I was in downtown Seattle, Westlake Center (a small shopping mall) had three. Upstairs, downstairs, and a standalone building, all within a couple minutes' walk of each other.

It's probably for the best they've seen the need to close some stores, but I almost wish they weren't, just for the absurdity of it.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/new-starbucks-opens-in-rest...

Re: Zynga CEO: "Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers."

#82

Post by danilocampos »

danilocampos wrote: post #75
mattmaroon wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of this thread about whether or not social games are fun is such an oversimplification as to be worthless. First off, there's the semantics. What is a social game? Is it something running in Facebook? If so, you're not going to see it evolve too much too soon. That's because of the way the platform incentives are structured, the mindset of the average person who is on Facebook at the moment (more often than not a…

What a nice barrel of straw men you have there. I love the bonfire you've constructed for them! For the purposes of a thread about Zynga, it's reasonable to assume a social game in this context is, indeed, a Facebook-flavored game. Realtime multiplayer has enjoyed a lot of evolution since you had to bind curses and status reports to your F-keys in Quake. Definitely share your enthusiasm for where it is going right no…

Nice one, jshen. Definitely buy that example. Much more fun than Farmville, too.

It could use more depth but match three as a game style has some compelling play.

Re: Zynga CEO: "Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers."

#83

Post by heinel »

cookiecaper wrote: post #48
danilocampos wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone who takes enjoyment from exploiting their friends in the furtherance of a glorified spreadsheet needs a hug, a trip to the ice cream parlor, and a meatspace game of Uno. There may be a baseline pseudo-fun available in the current crop of social games. Most social games, though, are more interested in bare metal compulsion than truly meritorious, universally recognizable fun . You're really willing to sit there…

Obviously it's not about "exploiting their friends". You can block Farmville or Mafia Wars if you don't want to see updates about them. There's a cooperative element that a lot of people enjoy there; they enjoy bartering with friends for items and sharing the wealth when they have it. Farmville is The Sims: Farm Life pared down to work in Flash on old computers. It is popular for the same reasons The Sims was popular…

>> but that doesn't mean that there's something nefarious or bad about it. Except in the article it read:

"Gameplay in FarmVille, FishVille, or Café World is based almost exclusively on what social-game designers call a "compulsion loop." Players perform basic tasks — clicking on crops to harvest them, clicking on stoves in restaurants, clicking on fish to feed them — earn fake money, enhance their farm or restaurant or aquarium, and repeat. In Zynga's hands, the art of snaring users with such gimmickry has become, quite literally, a science: Pincus told Time magazine last year that Zynga employs a behavioral psychologist."

I think the absence of something in addition to the compulsion loop is what people are objecting to here. The loop itself is not value, it's exploitation.

Re: Zynga CEO: "Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers."

#84

Post by michael_dorfman »

MartinCron wrote: post #60
momoro wrote: post #13

I find myself entirely on Pincus' side. The author of the article mistakenly assumes that Zynga's value is in Farmville/Fishville/Poker. It's not. Pincus once said that if he could re-do tribe, he would instead build "a platform for testing ideas about how to make social networks," or something. With Zynga, Pincus has buildt an entire company mechanism for figuring out how to make money from FB games, I assume revolv…

The value in Zynga is that it beat those 300 other companies. That's Zynga's value to Zynga. Not Zynga's value to anyone else.

Zynga's value to its users is what allowed them to beat those 300 other customers. "Copy/improve/iterate" can, in some cases, provide more user value than "create something new."

Re: Zynga CEO: "Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers."

#85

Post by mattmaroon »

danilocampos wrote: post #75
mattmaroon wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of this thread about whether or not social games are fun is such an oversimplification as to be worthless. First off, there's the semantics. What is a social game? Is it something running in Facebook? If so, you're not going to see it evolve too much too soon. That's because of the way the platform incentives are structured, the mindset of the average person who is on Facebook at the moment (more often than not a…

What a nice barrel of straw men you have there. I love the bonfire you've constructed for them! For the purposes of a thread about Zynga, it's reasonable to assume a social game in this context is, indeed, a Facebook-flavored game. Realtime multiplayer has enjoyed a lot of evolution since you had to bind curses and status reports to your F-keys in Quake. Definitely share your enthusiasm for where it is going right no…

Again, you're applying your definition of fun. Your definition is something that allows you to grow in skill. I certainly enjoy that.

Scott Adams wrote a very good article about the illusion of skill this week. Skill is mostly the result of a compulsion loop. I play Scrabble, I improve, so I play more Scrabble. It's not much different than harvest crop, get money, build another crop.

If I play Scrabble more than you, I will probably beat you when you and I play Scrabble. If I play Farmville more than you, I will have a bigger and better farm. Both of those are generalities (it is of course quite possible to play both games sub-optimally, though easier with the former).

Also that's not the only thing anyone considers fun. A lot of people look at a virtual farm full of crops and chickens and barns and think "boy that looks fun to play". Millions. There's more to it than compulsion loops, they don't keep players around for very long.

Re: Zynga CEO: "Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers."

#86

Post by mattmaroon »

jshen wrote: post #80
danilocampos wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a nice barrel of straw men you have there. I love the bonfire you've constructed for them! For the purposes of a thread about Zynga, it's reasonable to assume a social game in this context is, indeed, a Facebook-flavored game. Realtime multiplayer has enjoyed a lot of evolution since you had to bind curses and status reports to your F-keys in Quake. Definitely share your enthusiasm for where it is going right no…

Bejeweled It's social, casual, skill based, and fun. To answer a likely question, it's social be use I want to beat my friends scores each week

So is Farmville. One of the biggest motivators in those sorts of games is the comparison bar at the bottom that shows your level and that of your friends. Notice that is in every Flash map-based game on Facebook.

Re: Zynga CEO: "Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers."

#87

Post by mattmaroon »

eavc wrote: post #19
danilocampos wrote: post #7

The "social" games space is ripe for revolution. There's no fun there, nothing virtuous in what they consider gameplay. You don't even play with your friends, so much as exploit them for personal gain. It's a very cynical view of how to spend time with people. When the leading social games company is led by a guy like Pincus, what more can you expect?

The high-profile "social" games are just really, super casual games that can be attached to something like Facebook. The fact that they're not fun is part of why they are successful. You're just kind of trivially there, so you don't feel dorky and you don't feel like you're wasting too much time, only a moment. All online multi-player video games are "social" games, but most of them aren't hyper-casual and can't be b…

As I said somewhere buried in this thread, it's not fair to say Farmville isn't fun. It is only fair to say Farmville isn't fun for you. It is fun to many people. Not me FWIW (I live next to farms) but I've put a lot of time and effort into figuring out why, and I at least get it.

There's more than strict compulsion, though compulsion is present in every fun game as well. Compulsion is simply operant conditioning, and this happens as surely in golf, chess, or Scrabble as it does Farmville.

It is important to distinguish between Facebook games and social games. Social games are massive, innovative, and at least one is orders of magnitude more successful than Farmville.

Facebook games have severe technological limitations (web and Flash are still, right now, quite limiting, making something as immersive as WoW far from possible). They have clear-cut incentives both coming down from Facebook (API, platform rules) and coming up from customers (as you mentioned, their attention span is low, largely because they're at work).

Re: Zynga CEO: "Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers."

#88

Post by jshen »

mattmaroon wrote: post #86
jshen wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bejeweled It's social, casual, skill based, and fun. To answer a likely question, it's social be use I want to beat my friends scores each week

So is Farmville. One of the biggest motivators in those sorts of games is the comparison bar at the bottom that shows your level and that of your friends. Notice that is in every Flash map-based game on Facebook.

but I don't consider farmville gameplay fun which I think the previous commenters were also implying.

Re: Zynga CEO: "Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers."

#89

Post by fondue »

JabavuAdams wrote: post #77
fondue wrote: post #17

The entire article omits the fact that Zynga furiously iterates on their designs and improves them. I remember when I first joined Facebook and finding Mafia Wars to be just a cheap knock-off of other games with practically the same name. Within months Mafia Wars was streamlining their game, adding new experiences, and making the game more responsive and pleasant to look at. Their competition, from whom they copied,…

Ah yes. Local maximum death by furious optimization. B .. b .. but our A/B tests told us that this is what people wanted! True, we don't know what other people want, but they don't know it either (long-term). If we always give people what they want (and nothing more), we eventually end up at the big red orgasm button, and humanity dies.

I don't know if they A/B tested their games but I do know that while I was playing the parts of the game I thought were terrible slowly disappeared and what I found appealing increased. One game mechanic I thought was terrible was the situation where you had to go back to earlier 'levels' of the game to complete your sets of items. They introduced trading. They also completely divorced the PvP aspect from the collecting game so you could practically ignore anyone setting a hit on you.

Also, I would totally play the big red orgasm button game and much like someone addicted to a TASP, die from it.

Re: Zynga CEO: "Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers."

#90

Post by Psyonic »

ethanhuynh wrote: post #76

"I don't fucking want innovation", "You're not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers." these quotes say it all, what I love from Zynga (put aside the ethical thing) is that they obsessively focus on "action" and "execution", and not "thinking". it matters because action makes the real things HAPPEN, here's why: when someone come and blame them and their whole evil…

You can always say "It happens." I don't really understand your point. "Hey Fred, some $100 bills are missing from my wallet... you haven't seen them, have you? Ya I took em to buy some blow. It happens. Get over it."?
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