1. Zynga might copy other games, but it doesn’t matter
2. Zynga’s games might be simple, but it doesn’t matter
3. Zynga might dominate your category, but it doesn’t matter

Zynga might copy other games, but it doesn’t matter

Many (all?) of Zynga’s games are clones or spinoffs of other games that have been successful.  Zynga has the money and talent to develop games quickly (a couple weeks to a couple months) and the money and audience to promote their games into rapid popularity.  So what has happened several times is that another game company will make a game that starts to spread and become popular, then Zynga releases a similar game that blows past the first game in all the important metrics.  Where other games gradually build their way to millions of users, Zynga’s games have hit millions of users in the first few days and tens of millions in the first few weeks.  This has led to many accusations and finger pointing about Zynga ripping off any idea that shows potential.

Does Zynga actually copy other ideas?  I’m not so sure.  Well, I think they probably do but that’s an unsubstantiated opinion, so let’s play devil’s advocate.  First, let’s review the Zynga Minimum Viable Product testing method:

Mark Pincus:  We do something at Zynga that I call “ghetto testing.” I like to take someone who has a gigantic idea, usually a game designer, and they have some gigantic idea that this would just be great…  Maybe they really want a hospital simulation game…

We want to ghetto test it.  Again, we have so many bullets (engineering hours) we can fire, and we’ve got to just treasure and honor our engineers.  If we do our job right, they don’t get burned out.  They have a great life and we have successful products, so that’s what we want.

So I say to the marketing person or the product manager, “Describe it in five words.  It’s built.  If six months from now we built every dream you have, how are you going to market it?  Give me the five words.”

We’ll put that up.  We’ll put up a link for five minutes saying, “Hey!  Do you ever fantasize about running your own hospital?” … We’ll put that up for five minutes, and the link will maybe take you to a survey, where you give us your email and we say when this comes out we’ll contact you. If you’re really doing ghetto, it says ’404 not found’.  That’s bad.

So first you try to get the heat around it, you see how much do people like it, then…

Once we get to the point of actually building a game, or building a new feature, which we love Bing [Gordon's] idea of golden mechanics.  You should take away and steal it from us, the idea of not a game, but a feature that you can deconstruct and see that this interactive feature – a way to do a gift will drive virality or retention or revenues. So we put it in a feature we can build in a week – it’s a ghetto build we AB test it, we flow test it, we put it out to one percent.

We built a data warehouse with a testing platform so we’re running several hundred tests at any given time for every one of our games.  And no single user has more than one test.

What does this have to do with copying?  Each time they evaluate the idea’s performance, they prune the underperforming ideas.  This means that to get a feel for the number of ideas they test out, you have to take the number of games they publish and back out their pruning rate for each evaluation step.  So let’s say they evaluate at the Google Ad phase, the landing page phase, the two-week prototype phase, and the two month development phase before they put a game into wide release.  Let’s also say they take the top 10% of ideas at each phase.  This means that for every game they release using this funnel, they’ve tested 10,000 ideas, and since they have 20 or so games released right now, they might have tested hundreds of thousands of ideas.  I completely made these numbers up, but if you think they sound unrealistic, remember that over 200,000,000 people play one of their games every month.  That’s Japan + Germany.

So looking at games from a demand perspective rather than a supply perspective, maybe there are only a few dozen game ideas that are fresh, creative, and intriguing enough to have millions of players, and Zynga is likely to find them independently of what the rest of the market does by virtue of their sheer numbers.  Before you tell me how there’s an unlimited range of creative possibilities for games, blah, blah, blah, think about the types of games that are for sale right now.  Running around with a gun, running around with a sword, fighting, abstract puzzles, flying around with guns, social simulations, pretending to play music, what else?  Did I miss any?  This isn’t a knock on game designers, just an argument that whether of not Zynga copies other game companies, they would probably find the hit game themes on their own.

Zynga’s games might be simple, but it doesn’t matter

The next knock against Zynga is that their games are simplistic and the people that play them are dumb (NOTE: I don’t buy this but I’ve heard it a million times).  Texas Hold ‘Em is an exception to this entire point, so don’t bring it up.  But all of the ‘Villes share one common trait:  the only way to lose is to not play as much as possible.  You can get ahead by playing more and paying more.  And what do you get for your time and money?  A pretty fake farm, or a bustling fake restaurant, or a <adjective> fake <fill in the blank>.  You know what’s funny about that?  This criticism comes from people that play “hardcore” video games!  Which reward you with … a cutscene?  An ending animation?  A sense of accomplishment for finishing some arbitrary set of challenges given to you by someone you paid $50 to?  Wow kettle, you are SO black!

Let’s face it, games are about creating emotional experiences.  Hardcore gamers do it for fiero for overcoming some challenge but there are lots of different emotions people get from games (pdf).  While Zynga’s games don’t challenge your cognitive capacity, or reaction times, or teamwork, or much else besides your ability to commit to something and put in the time, those are not the way that the business of games are measured.  Games as a business are measured by how many people keep playing and keep paying.  Video game designers have known for generations that people like accomplishing something and if they feel like there’s more to accomplish, they’ll keep coming back.  This is why the role-playing aspect shows up in so many of social games – it’s easy to add new levels, new items, etc that keep people coming back.  So games like World of Warcraft that provide an almost endless range of items, accomplishments, and experiences make so much more money than shrink-wrapped role playing games that end when you beat the final boss.  Emotional experiences sell.

What does this have to do with Zynga?  Right now, there are hundreds of millions of players that will pay (with attention or money) for simple, satisfying simulations of things they could be doing in real life.  Lots of people like the idea of gardening but fewer want to deal with bugs, dirty fingernails, time commitments in the hours instead of minutes, weeding, etc.  Becoming a farmer is a ridiculously huge commitment to make, but playing one on Facebook gives you a fraction of the satisfaction but without any of the drawbacks.  Ditto for running a restaurant, tending an aquarium, etc.

But what happens when these players wise up and start demanding better gameplay?  Will they leave Zynga games in droves and crash a potential IPO?  That question misses the point – people aren’t demanding gameplay, they’re demanding emotional experiences.  I’d bet my teeth that Pincus and company, in their hundreds of ideas they test, include experiments about experiences that aren’t the current prevailing mood.  For instance, I bet that some users are trying out negative impacts on their farms (pests, cold snaps, etc), some are seeing variable prices for their crops based on a market, etc.  Some things with more challenge, some with more realism, etc.  If any of these starts to take off because of a shift in cultural mood, gaming experience, or whatever, Zynga will be the first to know it and the first to react to it.

To those who think Zynga only makes dumb simulation games, I say they make the games that the largest number of people engage with.  I heard Mark Pincus speak at Startup School and I have no doubt that they’re attacking the simple simulation games because there’s money to be made there, and as gaming tastes and moods shift over time, Zynga will be on top of those trends faster than anyone else.  They’ve got the cash, the talent, the audience, the experience and the drive to ride whatever the biggest wave in consumer gaming.

Zynga might dominate your category, but it doesn’t matter

So Zynga is probably copying successful ideas, and they monitor the best way to monetize current gaming moods.  So if you’re a game developer, there’s a fear that Zynga will steal whatever thunder you have.  If you’re a big publisher like Playfish, yeah, this might be a problem.  Just like being the second biggest publisher of word processing software only worked for a while, being the second biggest social game publisher could end up being a big drag.  So I don’t have any great news for those people.

But for smaller game publishers, you have the opportunity to make a much more personal connection to your players.  If you’re aiming for ultra broad general appeal, you’re vulnerable to getting Zynga’d.  But if you have some niche that not everyone buys into, you can own it and your users will love you.  For instance, instead of a pet simulator, you make the best snake pet simulator.  Most people won’t want to raise a snake, but the snake lovers won’t be able to get enough.  Or hopefully, rather than the 129th swords and wizards themed game, I’m counting on people loving a game that captures the power and creativity of science and technology.  Science might not be the biggest mainstream theme, but I suspect there’s enough interest to build a comfortable business on.  This is all typical Long Tail and Seth Godin stuff that should sound familiar to lots of people.  Do something unique and do an outstanding job at it.  This will protect you from the big bad behemoth who profits from the general interest but is also bound by it.  No matter how big or rich Zynga gets, there will always be new game ideas, old ideas executed in new ways, and too much diversity of interest for one company to monopolize.

just wondering what your revenue stream would look like. If you are focussing on online, how are you going to get your target audience to pay?

I think the reason traditional cards are so successful is because they are cash purchases – those kids don’t have credit cards.

I guess you could sell “credits” for the online game in stores, but it does add a layer of complication.

Here’s my response.

First and foremost, the goal is to make the game ridiculously fun and engaging.  If I can accomplish that, people will be happy to find a way to pay for it.

Second, having said that, I want to make it as easy as possible to pay for.  Credit card, PayPal, whatever the Facebook currency ends up being, one time purchases, subscriptions (“Johnny, you can have 2 packs a week”), etc.  I certainly don’t want payment friction to prevent anyone from buying.

Third, I’m relying on the fact that it’s education to reduce the parental aversion to shelling out for a game.

Fourth, while I believe there is a big market for an online game, the physical world is a large and proven market and I’d be silly to ignore it.  I fully intend on printing cards when the game is proven fun (and has earned enough money to pay for all the art and printing).  I can release a game with no art, filler art, or art only for certain cards and then upgrade people’s experience as playtesting, beta, and early gaming is going on, but I can’t upgrade a piece of cardboard once it’s out of my hands.  There will also be a connection between virtual and physical cards that I’ll talk about more later.

So to recap, I’ll make it too awesome to not buy, super easy to buy, appealing to parents and available in whatever format works best for each person.

Thanks for the question Eva!

Do you have a question?  You should ask me on @geekstack or at contact@geekstack.com

For those new to GeekStack, my background is that I’m a part-time solo founder with a wife, kids, a mortgage and a job.  Basically the opposite of the prototypical startup founder, and I asked him what I could do given my situation.  His main advice for me was to find a cofounder and possibly an investor who understands what effect my life would have on the burn rate.

Then he worked the Calacanis magic and had everyone listening tweet something along the lines of “@geekstack is looking for a cofounder with design and art skills for a trading card game startup”.  I got lots of tweets and that was from the 300 or so people watching live.  Hopefully lots more people will see it and get in touch once the episode is available for download.

Which brings me to the point:  While I feel like I’ve got a good shot at being successful on my own, having a cofounder to share the work with and complement my strengths would improve my chance of success and time to market.  I’d also be open to an accomodating investor.  Specifically, if you’re:

• interested in joining a startup
• passionate about games and education
• ***have graphic design and art skills*** (this is my biggest need)
• willing to invest in me and my idea

Then please email me at peter@geekstack.com.  I’ll try to get in touch with you as quickly as I can, and hopefully we can make something awesome together!

DESIGNERS:

See also the next post about the contest to design the first GeekStack card!  It’s a small prize ($100) but I’m going to need 200-300 more pieces of card art over the next 6-9 months so take a look!

First, let me share an experience from the Rebooting Computing conference I attended a couple weeks ago.  Many of the attendees were in CS education (both University and K-12) and the rest were people who loved computig, so it was no surprise that they wanted CS to be taught in high school and possible younger.  The main problem that even the starry eyed dreamers admitted was that school time is a finite resource and to make computing a required class would mean displacing something else.  Similarly, if I start out with 5 (or 10, or whatever) fields, then adding another one means restructuring the game completely, something that would be impossible after it has been released.  I wouldn’t want to exclude nanotechnology, regenerative medicine, or whatever just because I didn’t think of it in the beginning.

Second, since I’m taking a 21st century, post-industrial approach to education (creating intrinsic motivation rather than harnessing extrinsic motivation), I might as well take a 21st century approach to science.  Each field has advanced so deeply and specialized so much that the real eye-catching advances in science are in interdisciplinary fields.  I don’t even know the names of all of them – maybe they don’t even have names.  But knowledge and experience from every field is expanding the vision of others, and computing is a prime example.  There’s not a field of science out there that isn’t benefiting from computing changing the speed and nature of how they work.  Just as Magic has put out dozens of expansion sets that probe the design space of the game, the interactions in the color theme, and the mythology of the worlds they create, GeekStack has the potential to have an expasion for each new field, sub-field, cross-field, or whatever I can find.

Science is the depth I’d like to explore, not the structure with which to explore.  I’m trying to build a framework that can support the endless torrent of innovation that mankind is producing.

An important part of the theme and balance is the role each player takes.

Here’s the obligatory comparison to Magic and WoW.  In Magic, all the players are identical; it’s only the deck construction that’s differnet.  Same life, same restrictions on cards, etc.  Choosing how to balance the five colors creates the different deck personalities.  In WoW, you’re playing a hero, and different heroes have different strengths and weaknesses.  They have different life totals and can equip/ally different cards.

My first stab at player roles was to let them have widely different options.  They could play a novice scientist, a veteran scientist, a university, a company, a lab, a city/region, a country, etc.  Each of these would have different strengths and weaknesses and different goals.  While I really liked the idea (I think it was the first thing I actually starred in my notebook), I think it would be difficult to balance, time consuming to learn, and take some of the competitiveness out of the game if you and your opponent were doing different things.  I could make it so you can only play against someone of the same type, but with a TCG, that either ups the expense or limits the number of people you can play this.  Maybe this concept will see the light in a video game someday, where it’s shortcomings could be handled better.

My current take on the idea (which amazes me that I didn’t think of this first) is to let the players play different kinds of scientists.  You could have a physicist character, an applied mathematician character, a microbiologist, etc.  This way, more fields of science can be added later, and the player heroes can be included in sets that have cards that play to them.  For instance, if there was a geologist role, it would come in a set that included things like oil companies, bridge building, earthquake reinforcement, etc.  As new sets were released, they could introduce new character roles with accompanying cards, as well as include some fresh cards for existing character roles.  This way, rather than being stuck with five colors or eight classes, the breadth of options can increase, in addition to the depth.

I’ll post more tomorrow about my view of the role of fields of science on the game.  What I won’t post about (because I’m frustrated about being unable to answer) is what the goal of the gameplay is.  But when I figure that out, it will be a happy day!

As my mental rant about context continued, I argued to my iPod that those were all either started at an optimum time in the market and would be impossible to duplicate today, had huge economies of scale, or powerful network effects . . . network effect, why is that chiming in my head right now?

No answer from my head for a few seconds.

…

Then a sinking realization and a little bit of sickness in my tummy.

Collectible trading card games are a network effect business if ever there was one!  You don’t collect cards to play against yourself – the value of the game is if there are other people to play against!  That’s why I quit playing Magic in 10th grade – I was still geeky enough but my friends stopped playing so it wasn’t fun anymore.  So if I want GeekStack to succeed, I need to understand network effects and build around them.

[A quick primer on network effects:  the idea is that the next user or customer is more valuable than those before.  The more participants, the more valuable the service is.  This is why eBay, despite having a lot of serious problems, has never had a real challenger - they have the most buyers, so they get the most sellers, which brings more buyers, luring more sellers.  The telephone and road networks are similar - no one would bother setting up an alternate phone network where you use letters instead of numbers - everyone is already on the existing network.]

Network effects are great if you have the biggest network.  Not so great if  you don’t.  In the TCG world, Magic is the biggest and oldest game, having millions of players all over the world and has been around for over 15 years.  The only serious challenger I’ve heard about is the World of Warcraft TCG, and that has the unique advantage of millions of WoW online players who already know the name, the story, the characters, and how to part with their money.

What do I have? Bupkus.  No, not true, I have vision.  I have a powerful theme (science and technology shaping the real world).  I have a nigh unlimited font of characters, events, places, and actions already written for me, I just need to dig them up through research.  So now that I’m puffed back up enough to continue working, what does this do to my strategy?

Well, since people need other people to play with, this means that geography matters.  I’m currently leaning towards doing live playtesting with cheap ugly prototypes here in the Chicago area, and I’ve found a few groups of people on Meetup.com that play games.  This way I can get high bandwidth feedback on the game while I’m developing it.  This also means that until I get a playable version of the game on the web, most of the activity will be local here.  1000 customers buying boxes would be great, but if they’re all in different cities, it might be less valuable long term than 500 boxes sold in Chicago.

I don’t know what this means in practice.  I’ve put off developing the website, artwork, social features, even research until I get a theme, gameplay structure and goal and set of mechanics that I’m comfortable with and the have been playtested and approved.  Things might end up going in a very different order when that’s done.

And lock-in? After spending hundreds of dollars building a good deck, you don’t really want to switch to a new game that no one plays and start over, do you?  I’ve got to makeGeekStack enticing enough that yes, yes you will.

GeekStack Blog (No Links)

Enjoy!

First, I read the Twilight series of books.  They’re fun, fast reads that have a lot going for them (including providing social currency if you’re around teenage girls).  Unfortunately, the series is nearly 3,000 pages long.  It took a couple weeks but I read through all of them and now consider myself free again.  Here’s a tip before you start reading a series of books:  read 10-20 pages and figure out how long it takes to read a page.  Multiply that by the number of pages.  Decide whether you’re ready to commit that much time to the series.  This would have been more useful to me if I had come up with it before I was 2200 pages into the series.

More importantly, I’ve been stewing over the issues raised in my last post, about how to make GeekStack a card game.  The more I thought about it, the thornier the problem became.  Many hours spent in the Geek Cave (basically anywhere I didn’t have access to Twilight) led me to the following conclusions:

1) GeekStack needs to be a game if it’s going to be big enough to be a full time venture.  Trading cards have potential but probably would take a long time to get to the size I want them to be.  I fear that my attention span would wane after working on something part-time for many years.

2) Being a game means that the first edition has to be better.  Inconsistent early-edition trading cards are quirky, distinguishing, and potentially valuable.  But inconsistent game pieces give the following options:

• Break rule compatibility, making old cards basically worthless.
• Old cards are too weak and not used in the newer system, making them basically worthless (i.e. Palladium RPG characters in a Rifts world).
• Old cards are too powerful and have to be restricted, and become extremely valuable (i.e. Icy Manipulator and Moxen in Magic: The Gathering).
• Old cards fit in perfectly and do not have an imbalance with newer cards.

Of these possibilities, #3 and #4 are the most desirable.  #2 isn’t so bad but #1 would be death.  Who would trust a company that just wiped out your investment in their product?

As far as the probabilities go, I can simply choose to avoid #1.  Doing so prevents me from making big changes to gameplay later on, so guaranteeing that is a big commitment.  As far as whether I end up with 2, 3, or 4, there’s no way to tell that beforehand.  Any good game will have simple rules with a lot of unexpected implications.  I don’t have nearly enough hubris to assume that I’d design a game (my first!) right the first time.  (I do have enough hubris to assume that I can get it right eventually).

3) My plan for expanding by covering additional fields just got more complicated.  When the cards were just pretty and informative, it was easy to add a new set (say Astronomy) unrelated to anything that has come out before.  Now, if all the cards are going to be part of a coherent game, the game structure has to accommodate future (an unexpected) types of cards and subjects.  So even though the first set will be Computer Science, basing the game on accumulating computing resources would make it incompatible later.  This means the game has to be much more flexible while still being simple enough to be addicting.

4) Because of all that stuff I just said, I need to have play testers before I release a final game.

But since I’m self-funding, I can’t afford to print several iterations of practice cards.  I also don’t have enough people nearby that I could give the cards to, so I’d have to deal with shipping logistics.  Finally, since part of the fun is based on weighing the pros and cons of different, scarce cards and trading to get the kind you want, so there has to be some simulation of the card marketplace that would exist for a final product.  All these reasons mean printed cards are out.

That puts me back with all the problems I was trying to avoid in my initial post.  My new task list includes lots of simple things like:

• Make a website where my candidate games are playable online
• Make a game engine that lets me change rules and even game styles quickly
• Gather data from every game played so I can compare objective and subjective feedback about different rules, cards, and game styles, and combinations thereof
• Think up or generate game definitions and corresponding card allocations to test, some in response to feedback from previous games, others out of the blue to look for new ideas
• Get a community of several hundred or more people willing to experiment with my buggy code and unproven games and give me useful feedback.
• Oh yeah, keep working my day job, commuting, doing husband duties and raising my two kids.

Merry Christmas to me!

I’ve been considering and experiementing with the best way to go about tackling this new set of problems, but one thing that is for certain is that the next item on my To Do list is to change all of the “early 2009″ references to just “2009″.

Thanks for keeping in touch and Happy [insert whatever makes you happy about December] to you and yours!

I got kicked back into the card game space at the Fast Pitch Event earlier this week.  I didn’t win (you’d know if you were following me on Twitter) but I did get a chance to talk to three of the judges afterward.  The questions they asked me during the pitch and after the competition helped me pin down answers to a couple questions I had been avoiding.

1) Who is your target market? In my head I kept telling myself that it was “Geeks of all ages, everywhere!” but knew it wasn’t that simple.  On the spot, I had to answer that the people most likely to buy GeekStack cards are the same people that buy most trading cardS:  junior-high school boys, age 10-14.  Younger than that it’s a little over kids’ heads, and older than that it’s just not cool enough.  So once I admitted to myself that ‘tween boys were my market, other questions got answered as well.

2) What will the cards look like? I had pictured straightforward photos on the front of the cards, with some graphics around it representing that person’s accomplishments and affiliations.  Then I realized how boring this would look to a 12 year old.  It works for sports cards because the players are usually in an action pose and are literally larger than life.  So rather than getting pictures (which I thought was one of the biggest threats to the project), he recommended I either feature the cool thing they did (ie, for Dean Kamen, show kids building robots) or give a visual representation of the effect they had on tech or business (like having Linus leading a charge of siege engines against a castle).  make them cartoons, make them anime, but please, please, pretty please don’t show pictures of pale, flabby old men!  I’m not sure how they will end up looking, but I know that my first idea ain’t it.

3) How will you make it fun? For any set based product, there will be people that will buy more until they complete the set.  Two problems: when they finish the set, they stop collecting, and there aren’t enough of these people.  The appeal of making a game is that even if someone has one of every card, they still collect to get multiples of the best cards to make a better deck.  Also, because multiples are valuable, there’s more room to trade.  “I already have one of those, but I could use another.  I’ll trade you these three for it.”  Plus, it adds a viral element because people want to play against other people so they recruit their friends.  Plus it “sticks” in their mind and attention long after they complete their set.

Given my limited resources for marketing and advertising, “acceptable” will get me a big fat diddly squat, I need to shoot for “ridiculously exceeds expectations.”  Trading cards would be cute, but a game would be enticing.  It would be better for customers, better for business, and it gives a much more dynamic feature for the website (online tournaments, anyone?).  It has created a lot more work, but if that twice as much work makes me 10x more likely to succeed, then it’s worth the time.  I don’t know how this affects my “early 2009″ release time line (I’m guessing … postponing it), but I like the direction it points the product.  It does answer my question about which cards to make rare.

And the funny thing is, once I was determinedd to make GeekStack a game, the “designing a game” problem went away and I started having all kinds of insights and ideas about how to do it.  Suddenly becoming a GeekStack beta tester got much more appealing…