Showing posts with label Games. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Games. Show all posts

Sunday, October 07, 2012

Has Zynga Faced A Paradigm Shift?


Microsoft was a PC company and the web came along. Bill Gates fantasized about turning off the Internet, completely. It was a paradigm shift that was not going in his favor. In some ways Microsoft never came around to embracing the web. It is a big company, but it is still a Windows company.

Zynga of course is no Microsoft, but for a while it was the fastest growing company in history. That is a crown of sorts. But for now it feels like Zynga has not been able to climb the next big mountain.

Zynga, just like Facebook, has not cracked mobile.

Being data driven is good, but being too data driven can make you miss trends that are just around the corner. Because your reflexes have become too mechanical. I think Pincus might have become too data driven somewhere along the way.

But I am an optimist. I give companies like Zynga - trailblazers - the benefit of doubt. I think they retain the capacity to perhaps turn things around. The proof is in the pudding though.

Other than missing mobile, Zuck and Pincus also have something else in common. Both have dictatorial powers. That does not look like a good arrangement when things look to be going downhill.

Pincus strikes me as someone quirky. He just might be able to pull it off. In about a year or two. And a billion dollar valuation is not a bad floor to have. Just stop the f___g bleeding.

As Zynga Stock And Outlook Craters, Is It Time For Mark Pincus To Step Down As CEO?
Draw Something, a game that earlier this year was the hottest thing on the planet for about a month...... at the moment, like Zynga was a shooting star, driven by several viral hits, rather than a stable, enduring company. ..... like many recent Internet companies that went public, Zynga structured the stock ownership to give Pincus majority control. Pincus has 50.15 percent control of the voting shares. That means, ultimately, he is the decider, and not the board. ..... the valley’s prevailing conventional wisdom, which says the biggest, most successful companies are driven by strong-willed founders. Pincus has been that. And for a long time, it seemed he had the right vision in terms of gaming and social media.
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Monday, August 06, 2012

Zynga Recipe



The downslide in its stock price has not changed the fact that Zynga has quite a corporate machine in place. It is still there.

Inside Zynga and the making of its next hit, ChefVille
a mix of folks with vast experience in gaming, going back to the glory days of Activision..... there are a lot of moving parts at Zynga .... what a fine-oiled machine the company is ..... the team working on ChefVille was passionate about food ..... the game can make everyone “better cooks.” .... a senior designer who wanted to do a “Next Gen” food game to follow up Zynga’s “Cafe World.” .... all Zynga games are tested with pods of people, each focused on a specific aspect of the title. Those pods are comprised of artists, writers and engineers ... the external focus groups that really lets the team know what people dislike before they ship something into the wild .... Zynga’s development process is so iterative, that the company is really making a “big complex toy.” By bringing in both hardcore and novice game players, the ChefVille team was able to pick apart what they were building and make sure that it hit all of its goals for engagement. ..... We let people play with it and sit back and watch. We build the next level of features based on feedback. We have ideas internally, but community matters. ..... The team that I sat down with has built games on literally every platform known to man. ..... With this new social element, a gaming studio now has a unique connection with the player. Games run 24/7 and are constantly being updated and tweaked ..... Zynga knows whether it has a hit within minutes of shipping the game. ..... Zynga travels to other cities to pull together groups of players for testing purposes .... Instead of worrying about whether a game can scale, Zynga teams can focus on making the game absolutely awesome, monetization ready and full of social hooks. ..... the moment of launching a game is when the work really gets started for a company like Zynga. ..... The company also makes sure to pay attention to all channels for feedback, including Twitter and its own support site. ..... you can’t say that Zynga doesn’t have a platform which is extremely powerful to launch games from. ..... The engagement levels on ChefVille are so deep that my jaw dropped a few times. There are always things running in the background, everything on the screen is clickable. ..... The level of detail and connectedness for ChefVille is unlike I’ve ever seen on any game

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Zynga: Could It Reinvent Itself?


This blogger below argues Zynga got down the science right, but is failing on the art part.

Zyngapocalypse Now (And What Comes Next?)
Both inside and outside the walls of Facebook, the story of social games has become one of dead geese and golden eggs, flatlined growth, formulaic games and shady practises..... the main problem in social games was that the product was almost identical across all providers, and that social game makers had trapped themselves into thinking that it had to be so. I said that this had led them to treat the market as akin to fast food ..... I thought Zynga would miss the opportunity to spend incoming investment on building better products and instead inflate the kind of product and business model that they already had. .... without constant and heavy promotion, social games tend to fade away pretty quickly ...... the business model of social games is hollow because the value it provides is poor. ..... The obsession with tactics is directly related to the obsession with metrics, and this leads to a culture which devalues original thinking. Social games have the exact same problem as network television in that respect, in that there are far too many quants running the show, demanding numeric proof for decisions. Quants understand little to nothing of why players play games ..... Timidity rules. .... The second generation needs to be thinking like HBO, not network television. It takes research and prototyping time to develop good game dynamics, but more than that it takes the right technology, talent and faith. This last quality is perhaps most frightening because it pretty much means letting the inmates run the asylum. ...... You may wish that game design was a process, but it’s an art. ..... why should the player play your social game as opposed to a downloaded PC game, a DS game, an Xbox game and so on .... ........... Social games do not bring people together. Most players in fact play them in a largely single-player fashion, making contact purely for reasons of necessity like trading, earning Energy and so on. ..... Players play to achieve, to do, to build, to create, to explore, to destroy and to win. ... What games don’t do particularly well is the whole “living a virtual life” thing. ....... (this is why poker is still Zynga’s most solid game), it’s all about the self-propelled, self-organised and self-successful player. “Social” simply helps that happen faster, in what we designers are increasingly calling “parallel design”. ...... most players’ game graphs in their Facebook games are either empty or full of the orphaned accounts of those who stopped playing. ..... G2 social games will probably have very different delivery to G1, like the difference between “software” and “app”. ..... If Yahoo was “Search, Generation One” then Google was “Search, Generation Two”. .... A similar shift is what will make “Social Games, Generation Two” real
I think the guy just called Zynga the Yahoo of social games, as in what Yahoo was for search. That is not flattering. Zynga is taking a beating in the public market, sure. But maybe it can reinvent itself.
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Wednesday, June 29, 2011

The Sean Parker Analogy



This is weird. I am watching this video. And I am at the 27 minute mark, and I am like this is weird.

I am not into smartphones either. I mean, I don't even have one. I don't have a regular phone. I have a barebones prepaid. And the guy pulled out a primitive phone.

I am not into gaming. Reality is more fascinating than fiction. My World Of Warcraft is the crowd action across the Arab world. That's my "gaming."

I don't do product/coding stuff. For me it is about the user experience. Third parallel.

I don't care about money. But it is a good measuring tool. It is necessary fluidity. I have to convince myself it is about curing poverty for me to be able to think in terms of big money. If it is just, just, just about me, I am just fine where I am, and I need to find a new place to live by July 1.

That white male, how did he know these things?

White Male Conspiracy To Drive Me Homeless
Sean Parker, Billionaire, Was Really Poor Once
The Day I Got Called Sean Parker