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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."
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.
Yes, a significant amount. Farmville works by spamming your friends to join and send you stuff.
This refers to after hours trading on the 29th.
http://articles.marketwatch.com/2012-11-29/markets/35430351_1_zynga-shares-zynga-com-facebook
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The sharing of progress on facebook reminded people to go play the game and introduced new people to the game.
Yes. People will play less Farmville and less Zynga games if they are not there on the screen reminding them about their farm/whatever when they check their facebook page every 5 minutes.
People will play existing games less and be less exposed to new games resulting in a death spiral that is impossible to get out of.
Remember, Zynga has never made a single "good" game - plenty of profitable and popular games - but largley as a result of placement and spread through facebook. Nobody I know ever got a Zynga game outside of facebook besides Words with Friends on the iPhone.
Not saying Zynga is dead - but they will never be "big news" without Facebook. They'll just be another crappy company making crapy flash games based on other peoples games.
In Soviet Russia, the television watches YOU!
How distant does a platform need to be before I can depend on it? I would think the closer the platform, the better off I would be.
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
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
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.
Does anyone really think share prices have anything to do with logical thinking?
Logical thinkers didn't buy the stock of either in the first place.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
My impression(based on the rate at which they churn out new art variants and other slight tweaks, as well as the high attrition and fairly low real-money-user portion) is that they aren't so much worried about "fewer players", since most players pay nothing; but less new blood. Zynga relies on having a low barrier to entry and continuous 'social' spamming to provide an influx of new players, some modest percentage of which will be retained or monetized. Cut off the flow, and you then just have attrition.
Had a pretty good game with Farmville? You mean they did a pretty good job of copying/ripping off Farm Town? I'm quite happy to see Zynga go rigtht down the toilet. They deserve it. Even Mafia Wars was a copy cat of another game.
-Guns kill people like spoons made Rosie O'Donnell fat-
I started out playing Words With Friends on Facebook - but it's almost as if they are TRYING to annoy their users and the users' friends. Ads everywhere, constant prods to share each move, ludicrous "achievements" (that of course they want posted to your timeline)...
Using the tablet app is a much better way to go. I ignore FB game invites anymore; if I'm interested in the opponent, I'll explain how they can play against a mobile user from FB.
#DeleteChrome
activision and EA are publishers, they don't develop many games themselves
the games are developed by smaller studios. problem is you need to pay people before the game ships along with paying for millions of copies of games to be printed and boxed before you sell a copy. the publishers have the money for this
mobile you just send your game to apple and let them take their 30%. there is also a lot less nitpicking about graphics on mobile. i've seen more than a few cool desktop games get panned by critics because their graphics weren't the most amazing they had seen.
the lower cost of entry for mobile meant a lot more competition for zynga
> 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.
The majority of EA and Activision games are developed by EA and Activision owned studios. So, they develop games themselves, just like Zynga.
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.