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Facebook and Zynga Move Apart
another random user writes with news that Facebook and Zynga have altered their business arrangement to become less closely intertwined. Zynga.com will no longer be promoted on the social networking site, and Zynga won't have to show ads for Facebook.
"Zynga is the developer behind Farmville, a game once mostly played on Facebook, which at its peak attracted 82 million players a month. Zynga now has its own games platform, but players will no longer be able to share their progress on Facebook. Zynga's share price fell by 13% in after-hours trading following the news. It is the latest blow for the company, which last month announced job cuts and studio closures. ... Facebook said the move would bring its relationship with Zynga in line with other games studios. ... Recent figures suggest 80% of Zynga's revenue comes from Facebook users."
This is what you get when you depend on close platform.
Lets see how well the rest of the web game companies without a captive audience do.
*crickets*
Does anyone really think that less people will play farmville just because people can't share their progress on facebook? Zynga probably already has their own back-end for players to communicate with each other.
"shares fell 13% in after-hours trading". It's still 1pm in NYC.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
How much of their "sit on FB all day" crowd is playing Zynga games? What is the spend per user for a FB only user versus a Zynga + FB user? My anecdotal evidence suggests that a demographic of people who will spend 5$ for a fake chair in a game is a advertisers wet dream. But hey, I'm not a CEO of a 58billion...err I mean 55billion....ooops took to long to type that 50billion...aw screw it. A big company.
Nothing of value will be lost if farmville and the scum that created it die.
Zynga + Facebook could've been an amazing combination for the casual gaming market. Combined, they might actually make a profit.
the management is morons. for years they stuck to flash to make development easier and faster and ignored mobile. i used to play mafia wars and farmville and others to kill time, but the problem was you had to do it on a computer. work blocked facebook for a long time. that meant at home i had to take out my laptop, boot it up, get into facebook and the game just to play the 15 minutes or so before they wanted money. on my iphone i just unlock the phone and play
playing the zynga games once a day meant it took months to get anything done, got boring really fast. and they cranked out new games every other month
meanwhile gameloft, rovio and others built mobile games and then added facebook and other social features and are now printing money
But such a short record ... Well, I've been a gamer for decades and the one thing which is often the case is companies have One Hit and perhaps some minor successes, but there are very, very few Activisions and EAs. Zynga had a pretty good game with Farmville, but after that they fit the mold of the former more than the latter.
Just a matter of time before I can go to their liquidation sale and pick up a new office chair for home.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
They pioneered casual gaming. the kind of stuff people could play that had nothing to do with hack and slack and murder. most people have no dreams of imagining themselves shooting others or hacking them to death like the so called real gamers. funny thing is that most of their games were just like the so called hard core real games.
too bad they ignored mobile and are now history while lots of other studios like Rovio are now making lots of money
just like alfred sloan passing henry ford back in the day because ford refused to deviate from his original vision of a single model of mass produced car
No... zynga was the "let's make an identical clone of this newly released, popular, original game some other company made and has on facebook, and slightly change the name!"
If you think they're a pioneer of facebook (or any game) development... no offense... but you're and idiot
> They pioneered casual gaming
Social "Games" are neither Social nor Games. They "pioneered" casual game the same way casino's "pioneered" The Skinner Box. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber )
If there ever was a bastard child between Turn-Based games and RTS it would be social toys such as FarmVille. Social games are a total perversion of good game design. They disrespect the player and the player's time in order to make a quick buck.
i.e.
1. There is no way to "win" at Farmville.
2. There is no way to give items to your friends in "social" "games".
The sooner this "genre" dies the sooner players can play GOOD games without all the microtransaction and In-Game Purchases bullshit.
Team Fortress 2 is the _right_ way to do it. The items & hats don't really give you that much of an advantage. Plus you can *gasp* trade for them, collect them, or craft them.
farmville and Cityville weren't that different from Sim City and Civilization. Cityville was actually partly designed by Brian Reynolds or whatever his name was. I've read he did more work on Civ than Sid Meier.
big difference is you had to spend money or get friends to play Zynga games to get further in the game. it wasn't an experience where you lock yourself in the house for a weekend playing Civ
most of the anti-social geeks ranted about how the games sucked, but they were pretty much the same as the Civ and Sim City i've played since the 80's
really?
did henry ford invent the car?
did Sid meier or any of the early other early game pioneers invent their genres? nope, they copied pre-computer concepts
RTS games in general are just faster versions of chess
Even if Flash Player itself doesn't run, AIR does, and the same aesthetic can be found in HTML5 games.
i had to take out my laptop, boot it up, get into facebook
Learn to use suspend or sleep mode. Once that's set up, you can just lift the lid, key in your user account's password, and already have a browser open to Facepalm^W Facebook.
And GNU/Linux did a pretty good job of copying/ripping off UNIX. Is copying desirable or not?
Kids. Think they invented everything under the sun.
Let me take you back a couple of decades.
They pioneered casual gaming.
PopCap might want to have something to say about that.
And after they're done, I'm certain more commenters will come by to add more companies to that list. Sure, they'll inevitably degrade down to an increasingly-farcical parade of "well, company X which existed umpteen bazillion years ago were TECHNICALLY a casual gaming company because X, Y, Z..." excuses, but there's more than enough ACTUAL, REASONABLE data to make one wonder just what Zynga "pioneered".
Every business that has rented the building in San Francisco which Zynga now occupies has tanked.
First it was the Fashion Center, a space for the rag trade in San Francisco. It was never more than half rented, and then the entire garment industry in SF collapsed.
Then for a while it was occupied by Sega. (Remember Sega? Game console maker? No?) Some of the cooler interior spaces were removed (the building had a stage and fashion runway, and a nice atrium) and the place became office space.
Now Zynga owns it. In an excess of confidence, they bought the building. Now they have too much office space, and everybody is bored with Farmville and its clones.
I guess this is what happens when the Devil gets in bed with the Devil. They're both evil & deserve to die.
Words with friends was originally created by another company. According to venturebeat.com, they paid some $44 million for it in November 2010. I assume chess with friends came with it.
The rats are the first ones off.
...isn't actually a game.
Console gaming is dying!
With Zynga moving to be on their own and Failbook embracing others Failbook will lose on the gaming revenue and traffic while Zynga will lose out as well, no constant advertisement. This will be a win/win for everyone. Who needs the crap like Failbook/Friendstar/Myspace/Goog+ anyways? After all all of the functions those site provide is already handled with IRC, IM, Newsgroups, blogs, bulletin board forums, html, etc. The gaming can be handled in any other way without the need for Flash or HTML5.