The "social" games space is ripe for revolution. There's no fun there, nothing virtuous in what they consider gameplay. You don't even play with your friends, so much as exploit them for personal gain.
It's a very cynical view of how to spend time with people. When the leading social games company is led by a guy like Pincus, what more can you expect?
The high-profile "social" games are just really, super casual games that can be attached to something like Facebook.
The fact that they're not fun is part of why they are successful. You're just kind of trivially there, so you don't feel dorky and you don't feel like you're wasting too much time, only a moment.
All online multi-player video games are "social" games, but most of them aren't hyper-casual and can't be bolted on as a distraction to Facebook. Therefore, they feel a little dorky, a little like wasting time, and way more fun.
Yes, and that's an important observation. I'm not willing to accept that it's impossible to create a legitimately enjoyable game experience in the confines of the short attention span Facebook model, though.
Scrabble, for example, lends itself perfectly to asynchronous, light, casual play (cf Scrabulous, Words with Friends). But it's legitimately fun at the same time. You're rewarded for imaginative approaches to solving problems. You can play with no skill or lots, but either way, you'll always find ways to get better.
Most important: You're genuinely spending time with your friends. Sharing an experience that creates a memory.
This is a big deal. This is missing from almost every other pseudo-social game.
True story: I was job hunting, someone gave me a lead at Slide. Awesome guy, gave me good advice. But as soon as I found out I had to be conversant on the subject of a "game" called "SuperPoke Pets!" I vomited a little in my mouth and moved on to other options.
Social game companies: Stop making horseshit, start building something fun. It's possible. It's just a little bit harder.
Please remember that what you find enjoyable could possibly be different than what 40-year-old moms in flyover country find enjoyable. Also realize the latter group is what made Oprah, the Wii, and Zynga billion dollar businesses.
Anyone who takes enjoyment from exploiting their friends in the furtherance of a glorified spreadsheet needs a hug, a trip to the ice cream parlor, and a meatspace game of Uno.
There may be a baseline pseudo-fun available in the current crop of social games. Most social games, though, are more interested in bare metal compulsion than truly meritorious, universally recognizable fun.
You're really willing to sit there and tell me that you're comfortable with social game evolution stopping right now? This stuff really is sufficiently fun for you?
There's pandering to flyover country and then there's making something good. One will get you Oprah and Zynga. The other gets you Inception and Mad Men. One is quick cash, the other is integrity.
I'd rather take a smaller payday from people I like and respect than make crap.
> You're really willing to sit there and tell me that you're comfortable with social game evolution stopping right now? This stuff really is sufficiently fun for you?
You seem to have a great vision for what social games could be. I cannot urge this enough - please go build that vision now. The industry needs innovation badly. There are huge profits to the person who can pull this off, and I hope that person is you.
But my message is this - Build Stuff People Want. Many people have fallen into this trap, myself included. I thought I could buck the trend, out-innovate Zynga, and make a truly fun game. But in the end I failed because I spent too much time in an ivory tower making the perfect game, and no time making an enjoyable product.
A great analogy is engineering brilliant software, but failing to build something people want to buy.
Inception was a success because Christopher Nolan is able to carefully balance the things that make a great movie with the things that make great ticket sales. It wasn't the best movie ever, and it wasn't the best selling movie ever. But a careful blend of both lead to success.
No one in social games today can do this. I want that to change.
To think that one can simply "made something good" is a fallacious line of thinking along the lines of "build it, and they will come". Fundamental understanding of what your audience wants is so critical.
I'm not saying Zynga makes good games. I'm not saying you should follow in Zynga's footsteps. I'm saying you need to understand what Zynga does right if you want to beat them. And if you think all Zynga does is "be evil" and "buy ads", you haven't been paying close enough attention.
All of this thread about whether or not social games are fun is such an oversimplification as to be worthless.
First off, there's the semantics. What is a social game? Is it something running in Facebook? If so, you're not going to see it evolve too much too soon. That's because of the way the platform incentives are structured, the mindset of the average person who is on Facebook at the moment (more often than not at work, multitasking, able to devote only infrequent, short bursts of attention) and the inherent technical limitations of the Flash platform. If you ever saw the traffic graphs of a successful game, you'd understand immediately why casual is winning. It has a high bounce rate and peaks on weekday mornings.
If you define "social gaming" more broadly, which I think you should, then World of Warcraft, League of Legends, and many other very innovative games are social games. In that case you're already seeing social games evolve. My little cousins play Call of Duty over Xbox live with each other from their homes 50 miles apart every day. That's social gaming if you ask me, and they at least think it's fun.
There's certainly no accounting for taste. It's just plain snobbish to say the games you like are "universally recognized as fun" and the games you don't like aren't. I'd rather jam a ballpoint pen into my eye than play an asynchronous game of Scrabble. You'd sooner catch me playing Farmville.
What a nice barrel of straw men you have there. I love the bonfire you've constructed for them!
For the purposes of a thread about Zynga, it's reasonable to assume a social game in this context is, indeed, a Facebook-flavored game.
Realtime multiplayer has enjoyed a lot of evolution since you had to bind curses and status reports to your F-keys in Quake. Definitely share your enthusiasm for where it is going right now.
Asynch casual multiplayer is in a dreadful rut. The big beef I have with it is that so little of it is skill based that you can't enjoy improvement over time, except with more and more swipes of the credit card (edit: or pointless grinding). I don't think the games I like are universally recognized as fun. What I said, if you'll read my post, is that asynch casual games are relying more on ill-concealed compulsion loops than on anything an observer would look at and think "boy, that looks fun to play."
Until asynch casual multiplayer, as your semantic nitpicking requires I call it, leverages gameplay that lets players feel themselves grow more skilled, we're just not talking about anything of lasting value. Personal growth is a huge component of enjoyable gameplay and you can't just add a row to a spreadsheet game to simulate that.
So is Farmville. One of the biggest motivators in those sorts of games is the comparison bar at the bottom that shows your level and that of your friends. Notice that is in every Flash map-based game on Facebook.
Again, you're applying your definition of fun. Your definition is something that allows you to grow in skill. I certainly enjoy that.
Scott Adams wrote a very good article about the illusion of skill this week. Skill is mostly the result of a compulsion loop. I play Scrabble, I improve, so I play more Scrabble. It's not much different than harvest crop, get money, build another crop.
If I play Scrabble more than you, I will probably beat you when you and I play Scrabble. If I play Farmville more than you, I will have a bigger and better farm. Both of those are generalities (it is of course quite possible to play both games sub-optimally, though easier with the former).
Also that's not the only thing anyone considers fun. A lot of people look at a virtual farm full of crops and chickens and barns and think "boy that looks fun to play". Millions. There's more to it than compulsion loops, they don't keep players around for very long.
Obviously it's not about "exploiting their friends". You can block Farmville or Mafia Wars if you don't want to see updates about them. There's a cooperative element that a lot of people enjoy there; they enjoy bartering with friends for items and sharing the wealth when they have it.
Farmville is The Sims: Farm Life pared down to work in Flash on old computers. It is popular for the same reasons The Sims was popular and it appeals to the same demographic, but it is even more popular because Facebook has become a vector to involve _real-life_ friends and to allow people to get sucked into the game and play for a few minutes at a time.
It's a pretty simple formula, nothing really ground-breaking there. Some classic RPG elements + interior decoration + cooperation with friends + negligible chunks of time commitment to accomplish things = high appeal to certain groups. I find Farmville really annoying and don't play it (or any other Facebook games) but almost all females I spend time around do play it. It's more hit-and-miss with guys.
But is there something inherently immoral or wrong about this pattern? I don't see what it is. It's just a silly game; you might not find it fun to arrange animals and barns on virtual farmland, but that doesn't mean that there's something nefarious or bad about it.
>> but that doesn't mean that there's something nefarious or bad about it. <<
Except in the article it read:
"Gameplay in FarmVille, FishVille, or Café World is based almost exclusively on what social-game designers call a "compulsion loop." Players perform basic tasks — clicking on crops to harvest them, clicking on stoves in restaurants, clicking on fish to feed them — earn fake money, enhance their farm or restaurant or aquarium, and repeat. In Zynga's hands, the art of snaring users with such gimmickry has become, quite literally, a science: Pincus told Time magazine last year that Zynga employs a behavioral psychologist."
I think the absence of something in addition to the compulsion loop is what people are objecting to here. The loop itself is not value, it's exploitation.
Very thought provoking. What a great conversation.
I wish I had a clearer vision on the next step for social games. I honestly do. Sadly I think it'll be a long, iterative process before that industry sorts out exactly how to make a genuinely compelling experience that fits into the very real confines and perceptions you described. Bits and pieces will shake out as true fun but it'll take time to see it cobbled together into a comprehensively non-crappy game.
My lack of imagination doesn't stop me thinking there's a better way, though.
It sounds like you really took a whack at this. I hope you find a way to do something with everything you learned. It's a tough problem that can touch a lot of people.
It's not that no one knows how to make a truly magnificent social game. In fact there are many people who know exactly how to do it.
Right now the marketplace is too young to appreciate quality. The masterpieces are overlooked and the winners are whichever games are the loudest and most accessible.
That's how it will be until the public as a whole gets more experience in this area and develops a certain level of taste.
There was no equivalent to HBO or Mad Men back when TV was new. It took a long time for quality shows to make money - and even now The Wire was considered only a modest financial success.
Great art often makes no money. The better an artist you are, the more likely you are to die before your works are appreciated.
As a sincere answer... not really. All it makes me is better for me. And people who have a concurring viewpoint are also better for me inasmuch as we have shared values and my idealism (my self-righteousness?) makes values important to me.
Sincere question: Does that make you better than those who enjoy the "quick cash" entertainment? FWIW I think the answer to that is affirmative, but then I'm a walking example of confirmation bias on this topic.
Can we stop using the phrase "flyover country?" I and many others find it offensive. (Unless you're using it ironically, in which case, carry on, but I don't think you are.) Middle-aged women in boring desk jobs aren't that different in the center of the country from anywhere else. There are a lot of smart people and cool things to see there too.
I don't know. The guy has like 600 karma here. Clearly he is more capable of judging what is fun and what is not than the 80 million Farmville players.
Who made you the ultimate authority on what's fun? That sort of elitism is sadly not surprising here.
Believe it or not, a lot of people actually think Farmville is fun. I'm not one either, but I've met many who are. It's so ridiculous to assume that because you think it isn't fun, nobody does, and therefore it has no value.
The fact that your comment has 42 karma right now is the main thing wrong with this site.
I've never met anyone who found Farmville fun. This includes many hard-core addicts of the game. In fact, I find that most people who play it do so despite the fact that it's a pain in the ass.
I think I get what you are saying, and I don't think it's some sort of fun-defining elitism. There is a distinct lack of substance in a lot of the games, and I am really curious to see how the upcoming Civilization Facebook game turns out. Of all of the major players in the space, I would expect the most of them.
As I said somewhere buried in this thread, it's not fair to say Farmville isn't fun. It is only fair to say Farmville isn't fun for you. It is fun to many people. Not me FWIW (I live next to farms) but I've put a lot of time and effort into figuring out why, and I at least get it.
There's more than strict compulsion, though compulsion is present in every fun game as well. Compulsion is simply operant conditioning, and this happens as surely in golf, chess, or Scrabble as it does Farmville.
It is important to distinguish between Facebook games and social games. Social games are massive, innovative, and at least one is orders of magnitude more successful than Farmville.
Facebook games have severe technological limitations (web and Flash are still, right now, quite limiting, making something as immersive as WoW far from possible). They have clear-cut incentives both coming down from Facebook (API, platform rules) and coming up from customers (as you mentioned, their attention span is low, largely because they're at work).
What is unfortunate from my perspective (as a former WoW/EQ player) is that "real" social games are now besting Zynga at its own game: turning away from generating content for gameplay's sake and instead (again in my opinion) turning these games into cash farms.
Morally? Well, what's morality in business if you're not using child labor, robbing a nation of its natural resources or engaging in otherwise clearly reprehensible activities? I don't make any claims about morality. It's just out-and-out dumb to blame companies for seeking money-makers for its investors (or parent company, for their investors).
However, what Zynga has done has shown exactly how stupid the game-playing public is, en masse, and how ripe they are for exploitation for just a little bit of time-wasting. One can almost hear the boardroom discussions:
"Look, developers, just take Zynga's model for 'game development,' scale it up for us and keep doing it until we have their numbers."
Irony or coincidence? I keep getting the two confused.
To me this sounds like Zynga just took an idea that was already out there, improved upon it, and executed the marketing/business side of things better than their competitors.
The blatant art rip-off is evil, but the methodology of "taking something proven, and making it better" is not.
Apple does this all the time, and I don't fault them for it.
For the HN crowd who "can't find an idea for a startup", maybe this is a really good method of finding one. Look at what's successful out there, and emulate to make it better.
As someone who actually played farmville at least from quite early on, and the competitor that they copied, I can tell you that they didn't emulate, they copied EVERYTHING.
The entire interface was identical, right down to the little people that depicted your sex, everything was identical, the layout, the images, the user interface, everything.
I will give them a grudging credit for being able to copy everything with more style, but I have to say as a user it was very confusing to see a game, pitched as a NEW game, that was identical in every respect to the competitor.
I have NEVER seen such blatant copying, and it was the same with many other games, they weren't "inspired by", they were image for image, ui for ui replicas.
I did play Farmville for a while, but they just don't know how to make these games compelling, and I lost interest.
I don't think that there is anything wrong with taking an idea and making it your own, but to take someone's work and copy it almost verbatim, that seems pretty low to me.
There is kind of a proverb related to business here, which loosely translated says something like: "In a street where there are several bakeries, it is wise to open up another bakery."
edit: I remembered that I have heard another version, with a different take: "In a street where there are several bakeries, next business that will open up will be a bakery" - I actually like that one more.
I seem to recall hearing once that this was how Subway determined whether a location was a good spot to put a restaurant. If there was a McDonald's, Burger King, etc nearby then they moved in. The logic was that if it was good enough for the big guys, it was good enough for them.
I always thought it was a clever way to avoid paying for market research by piggybacking on someone else's.
Somewhat relatedly to the proverb, but you might enjoy the "Emergence" episode from RadioLab. It's one of my favorite episodes and if you skip ahead to 18:56, you'll hear about 28th St Flower Market in New York which serves as a prime example.
But, I highly suggest you listen to the whole episode (hour long).
Last time I was in downtown Seattle, Westlake Center (a small shopping mall) had three. Upstairs, downstairs, and a standalone building, all within a couple minutes' walk of each other.
It's probably for the best they've seen the need to close some stores, but I almost wish they weren't, just for the absurdity of it.
Right, but this relates to a business venture where you can easily spot where there is a market. Thus, it is wiser to enter the market where you are sure there is one than breaking in new markets by yourself.
Well, it very much depends. If you are the new bakery guy in a street with three or four other bakers, you are entering a market of high competition. The other three bakers are competing perhaps at extreme levels already, whether through branding, building a loyal customer base by providing better customer service, better products, a nice environment, friendly bakers, and price certainly.
Now, if you, the new kid on the block, enter this highly competitive market, you need to be extremely clever to be competing while not loosing money and, if so you manage to compete, they would probably copy you before they die themselves.
If however you decide to take a little bit more time upfront and invest more effort to find a place where your service is needed and there is little competition, you'll be making healthy profits. That is why copying does not win in the long term and even the company in question has now had to start to make their own products.
It's classic second-mover advantage business. Not only do you know what works and what doesn't, you get the benefits that the technology is cheaper and easier and better now than it was years ago.
I've often thought of all of the slow-moving entrenched companies that could just have everything taken out from under them by a good hungry team using modern tools and techniques. As long as you're not actively producing new legacy code, you should be able to catch up in terms of product sophistication pretty quickly.
That's not to say one could build FarmVille in a regular weekend, it would have to be a 3-day weekend.
Ironically, Farm Town was once described as "myFarm married with Zynga's YoVille"
But did Zynga initially improve upon Farm Town or simply attract more users through a multimillion pound ad budget? For the consumer market "copy what the cool kids are doing and market the hell out of it" is arguably an even more successful strategy than "take something proven and make it better"
The author of the article mistakenly assumes that Zynga's value is in Farmville/Fishville/Poker. It's not.
Pincus once said that if he could re-do tribe, he would instead build "a platform for testing ideas about how to make social networks," or something. With Zynga, Pincus has buildt an entire company mechanism for figuring out how to make money from FB games, I assume revolving around everything from what he calls "ghetto testing" to a/b tests et cetera.
Yes, Zynga obviously copied the ideas being a lot of its games. So did 300 other companies. The value in Zynga is that it beat those 300 other companies. This article gives us no way of understanding why it beat all those other companies. My guess it that it's because Zynga's value is in its "platform for figuring out how to get people to pay money for games" rather than in the games themselves.
Zynga's value to its users is what allowed them to beat those 300 other customers. "Copy/improve/iterate" can, in some cases, provide more user value than "create something new."
The entire article omits the fact that Zynga furiously iterates on their designs and improves them. I remember when I first joined Facebook and finding Mafia Wars to be just a cheap knock-off of other games with practically the same name. Within months Mafia Wars was streamlining their game, adding new experiences, and making the game more responsive and pleasant to look at. Their competition, from whom they copied, hadn't changed at all.
I don't know if they A/B tested their games but I do know that while I was playing the parts of the game I thought were terrible slowly disappeared and what I found appealing increased. One game mechanic I thought was terrible was the situation where you had to go back to earlier 'levels' of the game to complete your sets of items. They introduced trading. They also completely divorced the PvP aspect from the collecting game so you could practically ignore anyone setting a hit on you.
Also, I would totally play the big red orgasm button game and much like someone addicted to a TASP, die from it.
I heard the CEO speak at Startup School last year, and he claimed that he wanted Zynga to be an internet treasure--something with lasting value. Sounded good to me.
His high minded spiel then seems contrarian to the report here, and I'm tempted to believe the report. Makes me less inclined to see what else he has to say.
If it's true, I'm guessing eventually, he'll lose developer and gamer mindshare in that people won't want to work for Zynga. Then, would it be on its way to an internet treasure?
I would definitely go with the report. I have lost count of the number of software companies that I have encountered that win marketshare with similar ethics to that being reported here about Zynga. They talk up sunshine and value in public but then go Ballmer on their employees.
"I don't fucking want innovation," the ex-employee recalls Pincus saying. "You're not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers."
"The former employee, who requested anonymity in order to speak candidly about his experience at Zynga, said this wasn't just bluster. Indeed, interviews conducted by SF Weekly with several former Zynga workers indicate that the practice of stealing other companies' game ideas — and then using Zynga's market clout to crowd out the games' originators — was business as usual."
I have only a second hand exposure to farmville due to an avid player close to me. I wouldn't say they don't innovate - or at least they mask it real good. Farmville is full of new stuff that ties in together all the time, but general framework looks to be less keen on innovation.
I wonder how long can they run with it though. It's like where you have an ultra strong brand for games and you innovate by pushing various forms of gameplay scenarios (think of mario in various games not related to original genre mechanics). Farmville is just like the opposite, brand is the mechanics and framework.
Seasonal stuff they put in is the only innovation over original concept they snitched from Harvest Moon and alike. So I guess farmvilles ultimate fate likes where genre-locked games go - e.g. fighting games (street fighter, mk...) where original fad fades away and leaves in core player group. If they're lucky - and with so many users, they'd have to screw up pretty badly to lose all of their gaming audience.
The concept owes a lot to Harvest Moon, but let's not kid ourselves, those are very different games.
FarmVille is a well-oiled machine designed for virality, keeping people playing through social obligation and fear of loss, and monetization. It has its own peculiar kind of beauty to it. You're a 40 year old woman and your aunt, who you always keep meaning to talk with but never find the time to do, needs help with her cow. Not helping her with her cow says you don't love her. That is genius. Evil genius, but genius.
Harvest Moon, on the other hand, is a fully single person game with a story which optimizes for good reviews in magazines, because that drives box sales and that is where they make their money. It can afford to take twenty minutes until you get any control of your character, because you've already bought the game and can be assumed to wait it out. Any designer proposing that at Zynga would probably be shot, thrown out of a window, or shot after they were thrown out of a window, because it would kill the viral coefficient.
Aye, you're right about Harvest Moon - maybe "snitched" was not the word I was after for.
I don't think Zynga should be viewed as non innovative evil place as the article suggests though. Farmville is a good game in its genre. Because if it weren't, people would not play it. And I admire their driver for constant updates, which do take a lot of effort to think about and make. Tournaments, hunting for truffles with your pigs, honeybees for your bee hives, seasonal items like wedding gazebos etc...
And it's engaging mechanics works on multiple levels. There's that icebreaker level that facebook inherently drives which you've mentioned with aunt example. There's also a point based competing drive: "come on, that girl can't be a level over mine"...
Then there is show of level (sort of a competing) which I regard as most genius of all. It's geared towards women population. Where they show of new items acquired on their meticulously crafted farm designs which are more of a home+backyard than a farm. This happens in real life too, but this is more streamlined and on display to everyone you know that plays farmville. Genius.
Also, they produce lots of pixel art for their game - which is dear to my heart. So, I respect Zynga regarding farmville, a lot.
Zynga's already done the innovative part in figuring out marketing/distribution. Now they need to reduce other risks. Copying competitors who have good game ideas but weak marketing/distribution is a great idea.
Ethical considerations aside, this seems like a solid management strategy to me. They have the brand to push through large mass of users , who are not so much into gaming as they are into socializing. If I were an investor in Zynga, I would be very happy , although I would probably use a part of the 10x ROI to buy a sweet gaming rig and play real games.
I don't know anything about this, so I'm just speculating:
Are they into socializing? Or are they just into a pleasant distraction that fires off addicting dopamine patterns that they can also share with their peers?
Pincus talked on Charlie Rose a year ago about wanting to build a lasting company as opposed to being a serial entrepreneur. I actually love that sentiment, but also think it is hard to differentiate from his current goal: going public.
Wall street investors will value this company very differently if it appears to be a fad that will have momentary glory (and revenue). That said, wall street tries to value a company's current AND future revenues (with an appropriate discount for risk and earnings out in the future) -- so Pincus is trying to get them to believe it is building the bedrock of a company that will last a hundred years.
Right now Zynga is a revenue rocketship (even if you don't like the product, people, or business) that will make Pincus and all their employees wealthy. Pretty easy to get people to work there with those prospects. The sustainable business will be the work of the next generation of employees after first 1000 have vested and moved on.
I wish them the best, but wouldn't count on them being a great stable business in 5 years. Tastes change and the best employees will have long since have cashed out.
I attended a startup seminar where speakers were founders from highly successful startups. Their advice was: "First imitate and then innovate". It is a usual business practice to first copy what's working for others, then innovate to make it better and leave the competition behind. It makes sense specially in a web industry where it takes very little time to catchup with competition. Companies have to keep innovating to keep an edge over imitators. Web industry doesn't have number 2 concept. It is either number 1 or out of business. I think not having room for number 2 is what is forcing companies to copy others work and kill the competition.
If we look at sites like Facebook or Linked-in or any company building social websites/applications chances of finding number 2 is less. I haven't heard any Linked-In or Facebook competitor.
We do see number 2 like Bing, Yahoo etc because they are not startups. Bing is funded by Microsoft and Yahoo was number 1 sometime in the past and has enough money to self-sustain for a while. How long Yahoo will survive?
Tagged is a number three, not owned by a large corporation, not a previous giant.
When it comes to social networking, network effects normally result in one or two highly visible giants and a long tail of smaller, likely specialized networks. These can still be profitable, and of course there's more to the web and startups than stuff that is social in nature.
Sure, this is obviously the heart of Microsoft's successful tactics. Facebook, too, considering their newest ideas have been to copy twitter and foursquare. Actually, an embarrassing number of companies think like that. Unfortunately, the marketplace rewards them - consumers are indifferent to what should be a moral outrage AND to their own best interest, which is to reward originality in the hope that it produces more innovation. Instead, they reward copying and sleaze, and the innovators are extinguished - resulting in mediocrity.
I'm interested in how Zynga blatantly copying competitors is positioned as evil, but when Google promotes a software and hardware ecosphere that at heart requires the blatant copying of the iPhone, it's considered necessary and smart business. It can't be evil sometimes and not evil others. If copying is just smart business, then Zynga is proving that every shred of copying allowed by law is even smarter business.
There's a huge, mind-boggling difference between doing your own take on the general idea of a touchscreen phone with a user-friendly interface and "I don't want innovation." It's like the difference between a Cubist painting and a Picasso forgery — fundamentally they're both copying Picasso, but they're not the same thing at all.
And Picasso copied Cezanne, who copied Pissarro, who copied Corot, who copied Turner, who copied Poussin, who copied Titian, who copied Bellini ... everybody copies, so why are we talking about it? Oh right, because somebody made $500 million a year doing it. Copying is an accepted fact of life until somebody gets rich. Ditto Facebook.
And the iPhone "copied" ecospheres of Symbian, RIM, Windows Mobile, etc, adding a twist with an insane focus on shininess and touchscreen primacy. Google, when "copying" the iPhone, put their focus on choice (both of software and hardware) and the attendant openness. Microsoft is about to try to "copy" the iPhone, but with a distinct aesthetic.
The difference between those copies and the Zynga business model? The former actually have differences.
Call me jaded but lately I've learned that most of the wealth on the internet is generated out of "Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers."
I keep encountering folks with this attitude, and sadly it seems to be working for them, very very well. No surprises that this is deliberately disseminated at Zynga
"I don't fucking want innovation", "You're not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers."
these quotes say it all, what I love from Zynga (put aside the ethical thing) is that they obsessively focus on "action" and "execution", and not "thinking". it matters because action makes the real things HAPPEN, here's why: when someone come and blame them and their whole evil philosophy they can just say that "it just happens. we just happened to build it, users just happened to use it and the company just happened to make revenue. get over it"
You can always say "It happens." I don't really understand your point. "Hey Fred, some $100 bills are missing from my wallet... you haven't seen them, have you? Ya I took em to buy some blow. It happens. Get over it."?
I understand that Zynga is relatively good at what they do. But as a company I do not trust them at all. Just with the amount of spam advertising they do purely on Facebook it would not surprise me at all to see them sell your information to third parties.
It's a very cynical view of how to spend time with people. When the leading social games company is led by a guy like Pincus, what more can you expect?