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Why Zynga Is Unstoppable, and Why It Doesn’t Matter
Posted on | January 25, 2010 | 1 Comment
Everyone making games right now knows about Zynga. In a couple of years they’ve grown to hundreds of millions in annual revenue, hundreds of millions of monthly active users and a billion dollar valuation. They’ve followed a consistent pattern of taking an idea, quickly developing a prototype of it, testing lots of new features and analyzing usage, and ruthlessly pruning unsuccessful ideas or features. They’ve been extremely successful and as usual, that brings out the haters, the doubters, and the fearful. I’ll address each of them individually below. For the tl;dr crowd, here’s the gist:
- Zynga might copy other games, but it doesn’t matter
- Zynga’s games might be simple, but it doesn’t matter
- 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.
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March 5th, 2010 (6 days ago) @ 5:34 am
[...] is why it was a pleasure to read an article at GeekStack called Why Zynga Is Unstoppable, and Why It Doesn’t Matter. The article addresses three concerns/complaints about the success of Zynga. One is that Zynga [...]