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VC Defends Farmville, Touts Virtual Tractor Sales

Posted by Soulskill on from the see-the-economy-is-fine dept.

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.'"

1 of 148 comments (clear)

  1. People spend money on video games. by Fantastic+Lad · · Score: 1, Troll

    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