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VC Defends Farmville, Touts Virtual Tractor Sales
theodp writes "In a blog post, venture capitalist Fred Wilson gives his thoughts on ripe areas for tech investment in 2010 — mobile, gaming, new forms of commerce/currency, Cloud platforms/APIs, education and energy/environment. Asked to comment on scams and social gaming (he is an investor in Zynga), Wilson defended Zynga's Farmville: 'Zynga makes almost all of its revenue on virtual goods. I said in my etsy/san telmo post the other day that more tractors are sold every day in Farmville than are sold in the US every year. That's where the money is in social gaming. The "scammy ads" thing is total red herring that everyone got excited about but is almost entirely irrelevant.'"
In my Civ 4 game I built more battleships than the US ever produced in its history. Know why? Because it's a fucking game!
I fail to see how they think that their number for tractor sales has anything to do with the fact that it is a borderline scam, and a crap game to boot.
Too many non productive "things" are becoming parts of a virtual economy. What is this? We are still living in RL, this isn't the Matrix and even if, the Matrix still has an RL "dynamic" that keeps it running.
Real products (hard machines or what have you) need to be produced and sold to make an economy (and indeed humanity) better. Not virtual "stuff"....
This needs to be the year that those of us with even the slightest degree of technical knowledge take a stand against the goddamn "Cloud".
It sounds fantastic in theory, but once in the real world, Cloud Computing falls flat on its face. My development and ops teams wasted too much time dealing with Cloud providers over the past year. So my resolution this year is to tell anyone who proposes the use of anything Cloud to cram it. We aren't doing it any longer. It's a failed approach.
Just last week, during the holidays, we had to scramble after one of our Cloud providers ran into some hardware problems and couldn't get our service restored in a timely manner. After the outage exceeded my threshold, I called up my best developers and had them put together a locally-hosted solution in a rush, and payed them quite a bit more than usual due to the inconvenient timing. Then I called up the Cloud provider and basically told our rep there that we are done using them and their shitty service. Then I called up the manager in our company who recommended them, and told him to basically go smoke a horse's cock.
I know nothing about this story, but I just always assume that anything built on Facebook is a scam, whether for money or ID theft. Go sell your virtual cheese elsewhere, vampire gangsters.
Mind the Gap
Buying virtual tractors for a game seems ridiculous, until you compare it with buying virtual fish for a screensaver...
lucm, indeed.
The question I have is how do tractors become real money for Zynga. This is always a big question for games that are free to enter. How do you get your players to pay with real money?
there is nothing here to be alarmed about. it is just an account you buy and your purchase additional bits of data they will track for you. Same as you do in a gym when you buy a membership card and then add a training schedule to it.
It is sale of a piece of entertainment. There is nothing virtual about it.
And it neatly allows people to look a bit silly when they compare sale of a physical product with the selling of a few bytes of data.
There is NO virtual. Never has been, never will be. All that you got is products and services. Farmville is a service. Same as your phone line and all things associated with it are. Your landline is connected, all it takes is a bit to be flipped in the "virtual" world for it to work. No different from buying an asset in a game.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
but I have to get back to Farmville! My pumpkins are dying and I have 57 gifts to receive.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
Might as well compare the number of virtual Nazi's killed in games vs. actual Nazi's killed in WWII. I'm guessing there's probably a few gamers who have exceeded that on their own. And, like virtual tractor sales vs. actual tractor sales it's a very potent comparison that proves....I mean, shows that.....I mean, suggests....I mean, that vaguely resembles...ummmmmmm...absolutely nothing.
Might as well compare these:
Cartoon cranial anvil assaults vs actual cranial anvil assaults
"CSI" crime solving rate vs. actual crime solving rate
Virtual car theft vs. actual car theft
Porno movie pizza delivery guy sex rate vs actual pizza delivery guy sex rate
BTW, his claim is BS:
"Andrew Trader, co-founder of Zynga, said the company makes about a third of its revenue from advertising and another third from virtual goods transactions. The last third comes from companies that provide commercial offers, trading Netflix memberships and marketing surveys for in-game cash."
1/3 is not almost all.
This sentence no verb.
Two things:
1. Almost entirely irrelevant is not the same as being entirely irrelevant. There are people for whom Zynga's behaviour is atrocious enough to make them think twice about using its products.
2. This doesn't change the fact that Zynga's games are buggy, derivative pieces of crap, and more than half of my friends who've tried either Farmville or CafeWorld have left their virtual farms and restaurants to gather dust. If you keep dragging newbies in, but most of those wander away due to boredom or frustration, that's not really a "growth" business plan.
Modding "-1, Troll" is not a proper response if you disagree with me. Try reason.
Farmville is a service. Same as your phone line and all things associated with it are. Your landline is connected, all it takes is a bit to be flipped in the "virtual" world for it to work. No different from buying an asset in a game.
A phone line is a service that one can use to interact with suppliers of products and services considered necessary to one's continued functioning. An online game is not, apart from corner cases involving Second Life.
Except that tractors cost 30000 coins, which is easily obtained with patience, and doesn't cost any real money at all, certainly not the "FarmVille cash" - unless they've changed something recently.
This is not the same as virtual tractors sold for real dollars. In farmville, if you play the game it earns you points you can use to buy a tractor. This would be like saying that more shields were sold in Zelda for NES than were ever sold in real life, and that this fact somehow made Zelda a great game. (Zelda is great for other reasons)
stuff |
I said in my etsy/san telmo post the other day that more tractors are sold every day in Farmville than are sold in the US every year.
Well, at least you know why the economy is down the shitter, everyone's busy playing Farmville and not doing something productive.
But who am I to judge, all I do is sit around and read Slashdot all day, so...
I was about to say, "Yeah, but people have been spending money on video games ever since "Space Invaders". But I quickly realized that there are a couple of significant differences between this and the 80's coin-op arcade.
1. You can burn a LOT more time for a lot less money today.
2. Pac Man and Donkey Kong were interactive puzzles which only took a few minutes to play in most cases. They were carnival attractions which you visited for a laugh and then left behind. Games today are more like extended dream states which offer much stronger and much more quickly realized psychological rewards than real life does. --Which is why many people spend more of their waking hours and useful energy on virtual worlds than they do in the real world. It's REAL escapism.
It is habit forming, and this means that on a certain level it is also chemically addictive. But it's also relatively easy to choose against if you wish. But like Television, nearly everybody is addicted and so addiction is considered culturally normal, and thus to choose against it is actually counter-intuitive in the sense that we are all pack animals with a hard-wired feeling of comfort when everybody is mimicking each other's behavior.
For people to disengage, it will take public discussion of it as a problem, rather like the whole tobacco thing. (But since tobacco enhances awareness and video games erode it, I doubt we'll be seeing any such movement; certainly not from the government in any significant way). Our entire society is rotting from too much entertainment, and history shows that typically populations just don't disengage in time from these sorts of influences to prevent the death of a society. It's happening all around us right now!
Buying pretend tractors is just a tiny piece of the whole enchilada.
-FL
Follow that last sentence: " but is almost entirely irrelevant."
Someone needs to teach this dipshit how to lie. It's not almost entirely that hard.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
Personally, I think the game is stupid. There are tons of people out there that have nothing better to do than click for hours on end. As far as spending money on a game, this is nothing new. Look at WOW, XBOX, etc... This is just a game for slightly slower people.
So, if the revenue really comes from honestly entertained consumers trading money for an enjoyable experience, fine. Do that. Stop it with the text message scams and toolbar downloads..
But, since $9.99/mo in hidden text message charges > $1 for a tractor, it seems to me that the tractor is the red herring, in order to get you to the far more profitable malware. But Zynga can easily prove me wrong by stopping these practices....
This was a great example of a pointless statistic. It is possible to sell more tractors in Farmville than the US precisely because the US has 1200 tractors per 1000 agricultural workers. That is 1.2 tractors per person engaged in agriculture. How many more can you sell?
I wish people would stop playing games that allow them to pretend to live in mythological farm culture and actually pay attention to our real food supply and the dangers of this large scale production.
Farmville, and games like it, are just the beginning of a new wave of social engineering and virtual product testing. As these virtual worlds become more common, governments will step in and test new policies before implementing them in the real world. Not sure how that new tax is going to affect your national economy. Build a big game and try it in your virtual economy before going live.
And for you naysayers who will claim no government agency would ever create a virtual game, may I remind you that both the military and NASA have created video games already. It's only a matter of time before the Fed makes a virtual banking game, or a SIM Stock Market. When Trillions of dollars are at stake, testing before implementation is the only sane answer.
This also goes for product testing, political campaign testing. The virtual worlds can tell you a lot about how people will react to product pricing and uses.
I'm not saying that Farmville or any of the current MMOs are ready to do this yet. But soon we'll start seeing games where the true purpose is testing the reaction of massive numbers of people -- something that virtual world gaming lends itself to.
> more tractors are sold every day in Farmville than are sold in the US every year
Boy, I'm depressed about this -- and I don't even live in the USA!
And even more so, why should you hate or think the people are "stupid" just because they pay for entertainment they enjoy?
Exactly. I play FarmVille but buy nothing for actual money. I also play the slot machines at the local casino once in a blue moon though this does cost me real money (20 dollars for about 3 hours of entertainment). Both games are equally useless on the large scale in my life but both are fun for different reasons.
So before phones, we couldn't life?
A secret phone number is a "virtual" service no different from the tractor in farmville.
Labelling a service/product differently because is considered essential is silly.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
How about investing in real small farms.
You don't have to be a huge investor.
Make a small loan. Buy pastured pork.
Build a future of real food.
See below.
Cheers
-Walter
Sugar Mountain Farm
in the mountains of Vermont
Save 30% off Pastured Pork with free processing: http://sugarmtnfarm.com/csa
Read about our on-farm butcher shop project: http://sugarmtnfarm.com/butchershop
Citation required. All I can think of is you're channeling Gibbons, or perhaps some Heinlein-esque scifi worlds. I'm 48 and a lifelong reader of History, and it's not clear to me at all what you're basing that assertion on, so please illustrate.
What are you looking for citation regarding? If it's the rotting from too much entertainment, then that's my opinion based on observation and I'm not going to bother trying to back it up by hunting down research which happens to agree with me. I know that makes it next to worthless in a scientific sense, but I'm happy to accept that. I am confident in my powers of observation and pattern recognition, and I would be happy to discuss the value of my observations if you like.
If, however, it's the historical claim you want citation of, then given that you're a life-long reader of history, I'll have to respectfully bow to your learning, because I am probably not as well versed as you on the subject. I'm just repeating commonly accepted wisdom, which may indeed be incorrect. So what are your views regarding the reasons behind the fall of past civilizations? Did laziness and hubris and the seeking of trivial entertainment over useful social involvement not play a part in populations allowing corrupt forces to destroy their societies? Is there nothing at all to the whole, "Bread & Circuses" thing?
(BTW, smoking doesn't enhance awareness. It's a deadener, which is why it's used to 'calm the nerves' in a shock situation - very common for both smokers and non-smokers in the recent past like WW2. For the already addicted, it becomes an awareness enhancement only insomuch that getting your next hit shuts up the brain's screaming for nicotine. Which is why I'm having a morning drag of the damn weed right now.)
Hm. I've experienced both the calming you describe but also at the same time what might be best termed, "thought floods". Often when working, I'll find that smoking will result in solutions and cool ideas leaping to mind. Happened almost every time I lit up. There's also another aspect to smoking I found curious; it seemed to put me in a constant, light kind of dream-state, where I could still interact with the world without difficulty, but wherein everything seemed to take on an extra degree of thoughtful awareness. I was smoking organic tobacco with no hundred or more extra 'additives', so maybe that had something to do with my experience versus what you report.
Anyway, according to the research I've read on this, (no citations again, I'm afraid. You'll have to go look for them yourself if you're interested), the nicotine simulates a neurotransmitter called, 'acetylcholine', which is linked to memory-forming and other brain functions.
-FL
I will add however that I have seen a great number of semi-clad women appearing at the door, as well as quite a few appearing naked or sem-clad (the later is more common by far) and received a lot of views of exposed breasts by way of tips :)
Luckily I have only seen 1 naked male so far in several years of delivery :P
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
I don't see how somebody defending a company that he has stake in is even news. You're helping along his agenda....and data farming.
No, you get a message from the advertiser announcing that they do not support your carrier. This is the advertiser though, not the games themselves.
More people have fallen in holes playing "E.T." on the Atari than in real life, and that's not a great game by anyone's standards.
Andrew Borntreger
Champion of cinematic disasters
Anyone having dealt with Steam CSR's would most likely agree with me that the story as told above is decidedly dodgy. If it had been told in a believable way and didn't include the poster confessing that he's a completely thoughtless Dick then I would have gifted him Orange Box content via Steam(they allow that which in my book gives them a few credits for decent behaviour)
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
I may have been wrong in the above post. the HL1 key problem may have been a VAC ban hence I may not have had any dealings with Valve/Steam at all over that incident (it was many years ago after all and I am getting old).
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.