Showing posts with label HBO. Show all posts
Showing posts with label HBO. Show all posts

Monday, August 06, 2012

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, March 16, 2011

Netflix And Original Programming

Portrait of actor Kevin Spacey (in 2006)(Part ...Image via Wikipedia
GigaOm: For Netflix, a Risky Bet on Original Programming: Netflix is reportedly in talks to score its first original programming, bidding against cable networks like HBO for the rights to a new project called House of Cards that would star Kevin Spacey and be directed by David Fincher. ..... ected, that still put the price tag for a single series at about half the amount that Netflix has been paying for entire libraries of long-tail content ...... Instead of relying on premium cable networks like Starz and Epix to stream their on-demand content, or waiting years for popular titles to fall out of the pay TV window, Netflix bet big on a deal with indie studio Relativity Media that would give it exclusive access to the indie studio’s movies. It looks like that bet will pay off, as The Fighter, with Academy Award winners Christian Bale and Melissa Leo, will soon appear exclusively on Netflix, rather than going to one of the cable networks....... The overwhelming sentiment in Hollywood seems to be that Netflix will get the scraps that no one else wants. “What used to be called ‘reruns’ on television is now called Netflix,” Comcast CEO Brian Roberts told the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago. Time Warner chief Jeff Bewkes has been equally dismissive in the past, saying that he believes Netflix will be a place for low-value content that networks and studios can’t syndicate anywhere else...... One of the arguments that cable networks and distributors like to make about the effect that Netflix — and online video in general — has on the broader TV ecosystem is that by disrupting current business models, Netflix is essentially destroying the engine through which high-quality content is created. ..... could be good news for the future of what we think of as “TV programming.”
Netflix always needed to be about original programming. Netflix needed to be about indie movies. Netflix needed to release movies. As in, you make a movie, and you release it on Netflix. Like Apple has the iPhone app store, Netflix needs to become that place where you place your movies once you make them. If people watch your movies, you make money.

The idea of having to beg old movie houses to run their old movies has been weird. First of all, they don't seem to get the technology. Should be the case that business models chase technologies, but instead we have technologies on a lookout for business models.
Image representing Netflix as depicted in Crun...Image via CrunchBase
Better late than ever. I am so glad Netflix is getting into original programming. This is the way it always needed to be.