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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.
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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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.