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How Zynga's CityVille Drew 70 Million Players In Less Than a Month
An article at Gamasutra takes an in-depth look at how Zynga's new browser-based social game CityVille managed to accumulate tens of millions of players in the relatively short time since its launch early this month. Quoting:
"The Facebook interface induces a high degree of user blindness. It does not do a great job of exposing new games and applications, and lacks a directory or a 'Featured in the App Store' style of editorial (as Apple does for the iPhone), which means that for most developers there are huge problems in getting their games in front of users' eyeballs. With all of the free advertising channels on the platform now constrained or dead, this has meant that the Facebook economy has been acquiring an increasingly Darwinian shape. Where it used to be an egalitarian environment in which any developer could strike it big, over the last year it has become top-heavy with larger developers accruing exponential success, and cutting off oxygen to smaller companies by default."
Yeas, and every other Zynga game is designed to reward you with cross-promotes to come play the new one. A better stat will be how many remain active players (although it will still be pretty high).
Heavens, no. You're supposed to leap to some conclusions which you then proceed to approach as fact. Toss out some speculation based on this while forcing yourself to use unnecessarily obtuse vocabulary and include links to wikipedia concerning certain phrases and concepts you're proud of. Others will then do the same, with a variety of other points of view and argue rabidly. Still more will complain that this is the case.
Thus do we generate page views and 'user generated content'. The article does not even need to really exist, as all this will still occur as well as others pointing out the lack of article!
That is the law!
Ice Cream has no bones.
Yeah, these games have absolutely no affect on the sex life of gerbils at all, what were they thinking? I would suggest the people who count up these numbers are nothing more than narcoleptic parrots, repeating things over and over without any sense or continuity.
It all comes back to the legalisation of marijuana, your either part of the solution, or stupid! See here for details.
...
Q:How did CityVille draw millions?
A: Like flies to shit?
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
the Facebook economy has been acquiring an increasingly Darwinian shape
Um, Darwinian evolution does not reward the most populous species, but the one that is best adapted to its environment. In Facebook terms, this would mean that the funnest game would be the best promoted. What's happening here is decidedly un-Darwin-like.
I am helping a friend make a "facebook game" and within 1 week in alpha status with ONE post to friends we already have 10,000 players. He is studying Zenga's money making setups and asking how we can replicate them. I suggested lower prices to entice the dollars out of the wallet faster.
Honestly, if you can find some half-assed coders and a http server with mysql and php on it and have a game idea that is somewhat fun you can get a million players easily. I suck at PHP,HTML5, JS and it's working. IF he actually hired some skilled people and some skilled artists, he would be doing far better.
The number of facebook games out there that are crap are amazing and they have players..
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Cityville is like crack. I played it for a couple days and can see the appeal. It's a social Simcity. You can also send gifts and invites directly to your Farmville neighbors in Cityville so it quickly converted millions of FV players to CV players.
Where it used to be an egalitarian environment in which any developer could strike it big, over the last year it has become top-heavy with larger developers accruing exponential success, and cutting off oxygen to smaller companies by default.
Interesting, so it's like that thing... what's it called? Oh yeah: EVERYTHING, EVER.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I was playing Farmville happily and suddenly Facebook said, "give us your mobile account number or you can't get back into your account".
Not a big problem- create new account that doesn't require mobile number- point friends at it, continue (well at least for now). But any progress made in Zynga games lost. So now I view Zynga games as something that can be lost arbitrarily without warning at any time.
So I quit. Took about a week and now that time is filled mostly with other equally dumb things. OTH, I am drawing again a little too.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
After reading two pages of the really long and drawn out article; I didn't see any mention of the simple social gaming metric that the industry talks about: Cost per user acquisition: It costs every game about $1-3 per user they acquire, usually through direct advertising.
No, I will not work for your startup
How does that make zynga the devil?
Well, that in and of itself doesn't. Personally I already hate them because of their worthless, time-wasting Facebook apps that everyone seems to be suddenly using. This just made me annoyed even more, despite the fact that it's not directly their fault. In all honesty I couldn't think of a good title for the post. *shrug*