Zynga's Wringer

[Outlaw Torn]

it seems after the March Madness thing, everyone here sees Zynga as some sort of Mafia, Warring with the actual gaming crowd.

It doesn't help that Scamga are getting so much advertising from The Escapist either. It really can't be such a slow week in gaming that there should suddenly be a bunch of articles about their crap.

I watch the pigeons pecking each other in the tree outside to pass the time until the Escapist gets some actual game news to write about instead of putting up another billboard for a bunch of liars and cheats. I don't think there will be enough pigeons to last that long though.

 

[Glademaster_v1legacy]

it seems after the March Madness thing, everyone here sees Zynga as some sort of Mafia, Warring with the actual gaming crowd.

It tends to do that after March Madness. Whenever some obscure company surpasses the popular ones, controversy pops up. Afterwards, we tend to study the companies themselves. We just need to wait a month and everyone will move on.

Note* Although, I'm wondering "what if Zynga had won?".

No don't think about that its like say what if Hitler won? Imagine the uproar from certain groups on the site. MM would be made out to be a big farce by these groups than it is already made to be.

OT: The problem I have with all these socials games is the waiting times and the lack of depth. If someone could get rid of these I could give them another chance but I tried them for a month and this waiting killed me off them.

 

[Dev Null]

Your point about letting people play when they want (More Flexible Usage) is true, in that letting people have that freedom may well make them enjoy the game more, but you'd have to be careful not to lose the viral crack marketing scheme that is the one thing that I think we can safely say Zynga has done... efficiently (I hesitate to call it "right".) Part of the addiction of their games is that you'll lose everything you've invested in it if you let it alone for long enough to get hooked on something else, and part of the effectiveness of the spamflood contagion school of marketing is that you will be spammed by each and every friend who plays one of their games _every_ day, not just every once in awhile.

The folks coming to steal a slice of Zynga's pie will have to manage the herculean task of making a better game , but they'll have to do it without messing with all of the things that made Zynga popular in the first place - many of which are exactly the things that people hate about Zynga in the first place. To defeat them, you may have to become them - .

 

[Mr. Mike]

If it acts as a bridge from casual to hardcore, I don't care what Zynga and Popcap churn out. I swear this is becoming my mantra.

 

[Covarr]

Zynga's not about making games, or quality products. They're about making money.

It's a pity to see how much more popular FarmVille is than Farmtown, which was around first and is FAR superior. But Zynga released a product with a similar name, and marketed it aggressively. This has led not only to a ton of new players, but also a number of people who were recommended Farmtown by their friends and don't realize they're playing an inferior clone.

P.S. Thanks

 

[s_glasgow99]

I agree wholeheartedly with this article. And the newer, better versions of these facebook games aren't just 'around the corner' as Shamus says. The fact is that a lot of them are already here, they're just not as savvy as Zynga in the advertising department. About 6 months ago I started playing a facebook game called "Treasure Madness" and was instantly hooked. It's a search game where every tile on the island may hold treasure, treasure comes in sets (lots of them) and to get the treasure, you have to play a short minigame like tetris, bejewelled, and actually quite a few others. And it's constantly growing too, it's like a smaller, more facebooked version of Puzzle Pirates.
The thing is, is that this is one of the most balanced facebook games I have ever seen. The wait for more health is quick, one hour should almost refill your bar, and addictive.
Zynga has already tryed to copy THIS game, with their new Treasure Isle. They still miss the mark though, with the ephasis on island creation and not on games. Truth is I play them both, and as a 'h-core' gamer (gawd I hate that label) I should be ashamed of myself, but it kills time... time that should be spent working... time that I spend here... i hope i'm not fired

 

[Danpascooch]

I agree, Dammit Shamus, I was worried you were a Zynga sympathizer with your last article, glad to see this one!

 

[Aptspire]

We should all go to t5he Farmville players we know and show them the sheen of PopCap

 

[GodKlown]

I certainly hope another developer comes along to knock Zynga on its butt as far as Facebook apps go. I'm getting a bit tired of seeing this strange domination that they have on there with their games. Where is Sid Meier to save us?!

 

[Jaded Scribe]

Castle Age is a Facebook game very similar to Mafia Wars that outclasses Zynga at every turn.

Some of the things I like better:

Lovely artwork.
Quests are actually story driven, making you feel like you're really progressing.
Unique ways to craft items and summon creatures to aid you.
A bit of strategy (what general to use, how to build your army, etc)
Purchase magic abilities.

And, like the early days of Mafia Wars, special bought items are nifty, but far from necessary (company's gotta make a little extra money, right?).

It's a good game, with actual story development and a developer that isn't trying to milk its users for all their cash.

 

[Jaded Scribe]

Castle Age is a Facebook game very similar to Mafia Wars that outclasses Zynga at every turn.

Some of the things I like better:

Lovely artwork.
Quests are actually story driven, making you feel like you're really progressing.
Unique ways to craft items and summon creatures to aid you.
A bit of strategy (what general to use, how to build your army, etc)
Purchase magic abilities.

And, like the early days of Mafia Wars, special bought items are nifty, but far from necessary (company's gotta make a little extra money, right?).

It's a good game, with actual story development and a developer that isn't trying to milk its users for all their cash.

As I keep screaming in every one of these threads, it doesn't matter if other people make better games than zygna, they'd have to match zygna's business model step for step to even come close to being as successful as they are. As zygna's success is due entirely to the amount they encourage their users to spam everyone (and the unmoderated nature of facebook).

And once again, I'm threatened for exposing flaws in an anointed writer's arguments. Hoo-fucking-ray. (or maybe it was me misclicking the report button, lets hope).

The spam is a real issue. Through family members (sadly) I've seen just how bad their brainwashing goes.

As pretty much everyone that uses Facebook has probably noticed, now posts that come from the same app, or numerous updates in a short space of time, get put together in a link of similar posts.

This apparently led to a rage among Zynga's players that the links was making it easy to miss updates from other players (irony: Zynga players complaining that clicking on links on their homepage is hard). So they did a 24 hr boycott of Zynga.

It's ridiculous how much people will swallow. No thought to quality in what they do. At least if word about games like Castle Age can get out, we can hope to at least thin the mindless herd of Zynga followers.

 

[Erana]

Zynga's not about making games, or quality products. They're about making money.

This is a big part of why I dislike Zygna. Well put.
Still, despite how much I dislike them, I have to admit that no matter how you measure superiority of games, every game has its unique appeal. People will find something that suits them. With Zygna having such a large audience, the game will still have a disproportionally large amount of people who just enjoy Farmville, or Mafia Wars or what not more than any other game out there. As long as they don't shut down service, they're gonna have a suprising amount of people playing long after they're just an accessible toy.

As I keep screaming in every one of these threads,

Therein lies your problem. No matter how much reasoning you have, an opinion is still opinion. It is disrespectful to others to be insisting that your opinion is fact and implying that anyone who disagrees with you is intellectually inferior for it. "I, personally feel," "I found" and so on are very helpful in stating one's opinion, though the sentiment that this is a declared opinion rather than a stated opinion needs to be sincere. The hostility found in adamantly declaring one's opinion as fact is not subverted by tagging on, "IMHO."
Text is just a tough medium to communicate in, though; if there's any chance that something will be taken the wrong way, it will. Best to appear as nonthreatening as possible for the sake of preserving mutual civility.

 

[hopeneverdies]

I remember several months back when I started playing Mafia Wars. I'm not sure why I played it so much though. It was just clicking the same button repeatedly. Things probably went sour about the same time I unlocked the next section, requiring me to have so many friends to fight the boss for a risk low reward clickfest. As time wore on, I was unlocking more and more sections with increasingly high costs and wait times. Not much later I straight out quit the game, and any chance of me putting time into Zyngas apps was gone. Now I've heard the whole "It's for casual gamers," spiel tons of time. I'm used to that perspective, but I still see no reason that people even bother with an unanimated flash game that males you feel as if you have just wasted five minutes of your life doing an extremely dull chore.

How people stand to pay money, real, cold, hard cash for something that you are told makes a neverending game easier when the same effect could have been earned grinding for days but the reward is so useless absolutely blows my mind. Look at that kid who spent his savings and his mother's checking account on Farnville. Did any of that stuff actually do anything? Maybe, we don't know, it could have just sat there all day long.

 

[WhiteTigerShiro]

I heartily agree with the sentiments expressed in this article. You might however want to fix this part:

All that needs to happen is for someone to apply the Zynga social model to something more entertaining the Farmville.

Somewhat missing the N. Yay pedantry!

He also should have used "than". "Then" is used to refer to time (do this, then do that), where "than" is used for comparison (one is better than the other). His sentence as-is seems to imply that Zynga's competitors will create something more entertaining, and then they'll create Farmville.

Anyway, a fairly interesting article. Especially for me since my mom and numerous extended family members are playing Farmville. While I don't join-in on their conversations, it's interesting listening to them talk about it. Just recently though (this last Sunday to be specific), I was listening to my mom talk to one of my aunts about Farmville, both talking about how they have a few things they still want to see in the game, but ultimately neither of them saw themselves playing the game for much longer. I guess this is the part where Zynga's competitor's step-in to try and snag them. It'll be interesting to see what they start talking about next.

 

[Bat Vader]

Defining Farmville by old washing standards is, in my opinion, an unfair analogy. ... Hardcore gamers would look at a super casual game like Farmville, with disdain. So for this reason such an analogy would make sense to a hardcore gamer.

I don't think Shamus is saying that hardcore games are the 'better' alternative. I think he's saying another company could make much better casual games. Basically Wrigerryer as Zyngaopcap.

There already are better casual games. Hell, any game is a better game than a zygna product.

Zygna's crushing success is based upon the lack of moderation of facebook. Facebook users have to deal with spam on their own. Its been proven countless times that ignoring/muting/blocking a problem simply makes it worse. Zygna's success should be the final bit of proof pushing that theory to absolute fact. Instead, morons are misunderstanding exactly what happened and acting like zygna's success can be recreated without doing the exact same thing.

The only reason most who use zygna products even know zygna products exist is the sheer amount of spam zygna generates and the laissez-faire moderation of facebook. Imagine how Live/PSN/steam would look with games of a similar design.

"if you can't make something more entertaining than Farmville, you probably shouldn't be trying to make videogames to begin with."

Hear hear!

I liked this article. i like that there are multitudes of new potential gamers coming. What I dont' like is how Zynga is makin ga mockery of the whole deal.

Except there are no new gamers coming from zygna. They're never going to move on to any actual games because as far as they're concerned (to use the article's moronic analogy), they already have the automatic washing machine. They do a few simple actions, spam a few friends, and are rewarded with more actions to perform, and more shit to spam friends with. While actual games appear as complicated and unnecessary as the "wringer." "Why learn how to use that, when I already get the same thing from zygna."

You don't know that some of them won't move on to different games though. Out of all the people who play games made by Zynga I am pretty some of them have started playing other games not made by Zynga.

 

[Erana]

-snip-

Christ this site loves to cite subjectivity. Especially when arguing facts.

Fact being in this case, theres nothing unique zygna has done beyond the sheer quantity of spam it generates on a disgustingly popular unmoderated social network.

If you've got some factual uniqueness attributable to zygna, I'd love to hear it. As I've been extremely confused by the amount of zygna fellatio around here. I really don't want to chalk it up to the fact the zygna VP is the keynote speaker at GDC canada, as that would mean the staff here are following along behind the "big names" of gaming like a pack of dirty ignorant peasants, praying for scraps to fall out of their carriages. Also, the idea of anyone at zygna becoming a big name in anything other than spam makes me want to shoot myself.

Don't confuse my trying to explain how to post civilly with my wanting to support Zygna.

"If you've got some factual uniqueness attributable to zygna, I'd love to hear it."
What are you implying here? I know you're trying to say something about me. The problem is that this is such a vague statement, no matter how I reply to it, there will always be a way for you to call me out on it. A statement version of, "Have you stopped beating your wife."

" As I've been extremely confused by the amount of zygna fellatio around here."
As I was talking before, you're implying that people with a different opinion are somehow related to Zygna through the fallace, and the fact that they could feel any way other than how you feel could only be in their error.

"I really don't want to chalk it up to the fact the zygna VP is the keynote speaker at GDC canada, as that would mean the staff here are following along behind the "big names" of gaming like a pack of dirty ignorant peasants, praying for scraps to fall out of their carriages. " Same as the above, though change the penis analogy to one about a gross generalization of pre-industrialized society. Insulting the staff is intolerable here.

" Also, the idea of anyone at zygna becoming a big name in anything other than spam makes me want to shoot myself."
At best, this is merely an exaggeration of your blatant distaste towards Zygna. No matter the interpretation, however, you seem to be taking this matter much too seriously for your own wellbeing. Step back and take a deep breath; your health and happiness comes before arguing about corporate what-not on the internet.

 

[KillerRabbit]

Luckily they have a hide application button on Facebook! Otherwise it would be really hard to do what Facebook was intended for - keeping in touch with friends you don't see much anymore. But it's getting really tiresome pressing hard on every new application/quiz that keeps popping up... my guess is the bubble will burst soon and people will flee Facebook.