Zynga's Wringer

[jmoore4ska]

These people don't feel they have an inferior product, they feel they have the easiest product to use be rewarded for using. The people who play farmville actually feel they are actually sending gifts to their friends. They feel good about sending and receiving. They feel good about fertilizing and being fertilized. They'll never "move on" to a new/better/different game because even if someone managed to convince them they made a better "washing machine" they would still lose everything they had and would cease to help their neighbors with their farms.

First of all, welcome to the escapist! Second, what if someone were to create a game that gave you the ability to give gifts to and help out your friends, but didn't require you to visit every few hours for such menial little tasks? You forget that people could pick up another game out of curiosity and still continue to play farmville; they would not be mutually exclusive.

All that needs to happen is for a rip-off of farmville to do it a little bit better and attract enough players who also play farmville into trying it out and telling their friends to try it out. They might not stop playing zynga games, but if the new ones are good enough, and enough people make the switch with them, they'd probably forget about them.

I mean, when people switched en masse from myspace to facebook, they didn't lose all their friends. I bet what happened is that some people with myspaces had concurrent facebook accounts, told their friends about it, and as they all visited facebook more and more, they slowly forgot about myspace altogether. Same principle, i'd think.

 

[rembrandtqeinstein]

Three words: World of Goo

There is not a single person who hasn't enjoyed watching the game and not one person who actually played it and hasn't been hooked. And once someone played through an awesome game experience like World of Goo I think they would have trouble going back to their crappy farm.

 

[lilithfey]

I think the assumption that Farmville players are waiting for the next best thing because they have not been exposed to something better might be a fallacy. I am a "hardcore" gamer and I play Farmville as well because it fits a certain niche/need/interest in my life.

I play Farmville in the morning when I stumble bleary eyed into work. I play immediately after lunch when I'm digesting. It is easy to access from a browser. I appreciate its limited scope because it makes me stop and get back to work. The interesting thing to me though is that everyone I know has dropped the game because it has taken way to much of their time. Yes there are moments of down time when you are waiting for something to occur but that is the nature of the game. It is designed specifically for people to come and go. They want a morsel not a 5 course meal. Anyway, I can't help thinking of all the time I stand around Last Rebellion not doing anything waiting for my helath/mana bar to fill. It is even more frustrating in a scenario like that because I can click away and do something else.

Farmville is largely a self paced game as well. You can choose to come back multiple times a day or you can choose to come back every three days. I don't buy the idea that you are a slave to their whim. There is also a nice buffer in withering time that allows flexibility of return time. If the game was that harsh or unrelenting nobody would play.

I think arguing if Farmville is actually a "game" is silly. Most of the arguments are based around the subjective idea of fun. Which my retort is "If you don't think it is fun or interesting don't play it." There are certain genres of games that don't appeal to me. I don't question if they should even exist though because I do not enjoy them. Farmville shares traits with many games across genres. It has achievements/rewards. It has goals. It takes planning. It takes cooperation. It has rules and boundaries. It has levels. Unlike a lot of games though it allows you to decide what your objective is. Are you playing to decorate? Are you playing to be the top scorer? Are you playing to try to get all the achievements? Are you just playing to have an interest in common with you friends and mother?

There is also a lack of perspective on how the Farmville has evolved. Most people say they only played it for a week or two the stopped. I've been playing since October and have seen how the game has been on a constant path of evolution. The game is not static as everyone here seems to assume. New features and shiny things are added. Zynga is already evolving itself into the next thing.

So quick summary of why I play:
1. I like having something in common with friends and family.
2. I like the bite size shape of it.
3. I like leveling and getting achievements.
4. I like avoiding work.
5. I like being able to leave it an answer and email, something you can't do in an arcade/puzzle style game.

Also, I have tried other games it is prohibitively difficult to begin a new social game by yourself. You don't have the network already there. Another reason people will stay with Farmville and are not looking for the next thing.

 

[RedRingRico]

And to anyone saying "it lowers the barrier to gaming", how hard is it to type "www.kongregate.com" or "www.newgrounds.com" into an address bar or a search engine?

Why would one be searching the URL if one already knows it? Zynga's games basically spread via the principle of "I see my friends posting status updates/my friends send me gifts/invites for this game, so I shall check it out". If I didn't know what Kongregate or Newgrounds were, I wouldn't know to look for them. I mean, I'd never heard of Kongregate until I heard of it via word of mouth in the nerd haven that was my old high school computing class.

A lot of the arguments on this topic seem to suppose that people who play Facebook games know about other games and are simply choosing to not play them when in fact they don't. Virally spread a link to a Bejewelled app on your status page and it will spread with the same fervour. As I know from the experience of the Bejewelled Blitz high score spam that is currently overtaking the "help mah farm guyz!" posts on my Facebook front page.

 

[beddo]

Experienced Points: Zynga's Wringer

Seems like everyone these days is playing Farmville. Let's fix that.

Read Full Article

If it were a simple case of making a better game than FarmVille then Zynga would be dead in the water as this has already been done!


Yes, there are lots of competitors looking to get in. The market has low entry costs and 'viralty' in a non-discriminating version of advertising which supports a title based on its merits. But if it's as simple as you suggest then why has it not already happened?

Your suggestions for 'improvements' simply don't appeal to the audience. If you read about Zynga, (there's a Kotaku podcast with Zynga's COO, Marcus Segal) then you would see that the 'wither' feature was massively popular and helped contribute to the 'stickiness' of the game in a significant way. Presentation and artwork clearly aren't all that relevant to the popularity of Zynga's games, just look at some of their competitors' titles that look better but don't perform as well.

The idea that people who play these games only do so because they don't know there's better stuff out there is pure nonsense. It's not down to knowledge of competing products, it's the barriers to being able to play those games; costs, installing, complicated controls, in-depth mechanics etc.

Sadly, the gaming press are still failing to recognise the new market and some of the fundamental changes and effects that the social games, micro-transactions and the 'freemium' models are having on the entire industry. This article is also guilty of failing to recognise social games as nothing more than a fad and certainly does not understand any of the reasons for its rise and current popularity.

Ultimately, FarmVille isn't popular because it's a good 'game' per se, it's because it allows users to express themselves and share that expression with their friends.

 

[beddo]

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.

If it were down to spam then how do you explain the 30 MILLION DAILY players!? That's every day just on FarmVille! Obviously, something is bringing them back to play regularly.

 

[beddo]

I have to laugh at these Farmville players, not in a offensive manner but because there are free games with much more depth, more scope for the player to use thier own ingenuity than Farmsville... and you dont even need to have ad's around.

I mean Dwarf Fortress , its a very hard to get into game with seriously basic graphics (ASCII or Tilesets), a nightmare of a UI and the learning curve of a overhanging cliff on a snowscape during avalanche season ... and having a mobile phone in the pocket with a LOUD call tune.

... but its one hell of a deep and gratifying game, the sheer scope in what you can do once you understand the underlying game world rules is immense.
Its easy to sit there for hours happily plotting out a massive fort, and even if things go wrong and you lose... its still fun, and for most players its just a chance to try out a new idea for a new fort.

But the type of users that play FarmVille don't want those games otherwise they would be playing them. Although I agree there is certainly an aspect of ;Consumer is NOT king'. Simply put, we buy what we are sold rather than sold what we want to buy.

 

[beddo]

I dunno. Get Kongregate to implement a spamming system on Facebook? "I just scored 1,689m on Canabait, click here and try to beat it"?

Honestly, I think that the "social" gaming market is a bubble, and I think it's simply unsustainable. The Playfish execs were claiming that half of all active Facebook users play a "social" game a couple of weeks ago. I doubt that's true, and I imagine there's a large chunk of Facebook users cheesed off by the amount of spam "social" gaming in general generates. Hopeless B has a point: Zynga would not be in the position it is today if they did not actively encourage spamming.

And to anyone saying "it lowers the barrier to gaming", how hard is it to type "www.kongregate.com" or "www.newgrounds.com" into an address bar or a search engine?

I think that Facebook has not got into the position Google has, in which thinking that Google will go bust is pretty far-fetched. Google has internet search, map directions, a comparison website, mobile phones, e-mail, a blog provider, YouTube, a web browser and is developing an operating system, amongst hundreds of different things. If Google went bust, the technology industry in general would be severely affected. Facebook has, well... Facebook. If they went bust, people will move on.

I think you are seriously underestimating how big this market is. Zynga have a total of around 67 MILLION DAILY players across all their games (including single users that play multiple games). Facebook has around 400 million members, that's HUGE, it's certainly bigger than the 80 million or so Twitter accounts especially when you bear in mind that Facebook make money, Twitter don't (yet).

Facebook is not going away, social games are not going away, not for the foreseeable future anyway. The fall of a company as big a Facebook which generates huge revenues and adds value to many websites would be disastrous and have a big effect on the economy (Not like the banks or anything on that scale).

 

[Silva]

For their part, Zynga isn't likely going to be very good at defending itself. They've got a formula that's currently making them rich.

My emphasis added.

For the record, I'm pretty sure that you shouldn't refer to something as an "it" then as a "they". Companies can be referred to as either, but it's better English to stay consistent.

Ergo, this approach would be closer to correct:

Zynga probably aren't going to be very good at defending their company. They've got a formula that's currently making them rich.

Or this one:

Zynga isn't likely to be very good at defending itself. It's got a formula that's currently making it rich.

I feel bad for doing this to you, Shamus. But I couldn't resist. I'm so very sorry.

Now, in all seriousness... I do agree with your article. Mostly.

There is a lot to be said for the potential to tap into that writhing mass of zombies playing Zynga's games. I'm one of them, as well as a normal "hardcore" gamer. I know that you could easily attract me or someone more casual to a better game.

The thing is though, I'm not sure that the potential to tap into that mass isn't being utilised already. In fact, I'm certain that it is. By many people. Too many for their own good, actually. Because there's so much pressure in the routes that could attract people to play games that are, to quote many of the advertisements, "better than [insert Zynga game that you're playing here]", none of them is likely to pull a following out that is anywhere near competitive to the 16 million plus who are playing these games. More than likely, they'll tear the pie into pieces, and none of them will be as lucky as the original owner was.

So let's not assume that these other games will enjoy anywhere near as much success. I'm quite certain that they wouldn't.

 

[Craftybonds]

I'm not sure if the wringer and the washing machine analogy is the proper one to use here.

This scenario is only true if you're considering games like peggle and bejeweled to be the "washing machine" in this case. What I'm trying to say, is that the majority of casual gamers are going to stay casual gamers no matter how far technology and gameplay progresses.