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FarmVille Now Worth More Than EA
tekgoblin writes "Zynga, the creators of the popular hit Facebook game FarmVille, should be happy today as the company's worth has passed that of EA (Electronic Arts)."
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This just shows the power of casual games and social interaction within them, similar to Wii but even better.
I can already see how many posts here will be about how dumb the game is and how only dumb people play it, but I don't think it matters. People like it and the company is making more money than EA. They don't have piracy problems, they have lower development costs and a have HUGE untapped market to gain that will most likely grow a lot more in the future as this all is still so new. But that they already passed the industry giant EA really shows something.
And good for them and the people who play FarmVille and other social games on social networking games. I think it has been over 20 years that we have talked about how to get gaming to be more "normal" and how to get girls to game too - this is it. Let people enjoy the games they like.
Sort of nitpicking but if you click through to the businessweek source article, you'll notice that Zynga Game Network's value is an estimated worth while EA's value is a stock-market value. You should note that the former is estimated by SharesPost Inc. while the latter is determined by the Nasdaq Stock Exchange (in the past year EA has slumped almost 20%).
That's not to say Zynga isn't worth this much, I had a very shocking realization one day as I went to 7 Eleven to pick up some milk. Zynga has partnered with 7 Eleven in selling and marketing FarmVille, Mafia Wars and YoVille items and 'currency.' That's right, like a phone card you can get a prepaid Farmville card at any 7 Eleven (at least in my area) and they were putting free items on Slurpees, Big Gulps, coffee, candy and fast food they sold in the store. So you'd get this little peel off thing giving you a bulletproof vest in Mafia Wars and then it'd tell you how to log in to use it. I bet that alone got a lot more people hooked on Facebook -- just to get to their free item in Zynga's game (and this is why I feel borderline justified to call it a stratagem instead of strategy)!
For sometime now you've been able to buy WoW prepaid cards at 7 Eleven and there's been a handful of Xbox/PS/Wii games behind the counter but when I saw the shelf space and signs devoted to this stuff I knew it was going to dwarf all other forms of gaming very quickly. I know there are plenty of other reasons but when you see something completely outside the realm of where you think you should see a social game (I was going to 7 Eleven to pick up some skim milk), it really hits you right in the face how big this is going to get. Put yourself even spread out across the entire United States with ~10,000 locations of advertising and insertion and you're going to beat anything EA can put out with its billion of dollars. In order to compete with this, EA would have to put a demo disc of four different games targeting different ages for free on the counter of 7 Elevens (like a separate AOL disc for three different consoles and CPU). Despite how relatively inexpensive that would be for them, they aren't going to do that. And that's how Zynga wins out, the illusion that it's 'free' paired with efficient mass distribution of the free concept.
My work here is dung.
As opposed to who, Zynga?
"I don't fucking want innovation," the ex-employee recalls Pincus [Zynga's CEO] saying. "You're not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers."
http://www.bnet.com/blog/high-tech/zynga-8217s-winning-strategy-don-8217t-innovate-copy-execute-and-scale/1157
Facebook's change of policy could make Zynga worthless overnight. EA on the other hand holds hundreds of IPs, studios etc. These two are not even comparable or in the same league..