f13.net

http://www.sfweekly.com/2010-09-08/news/farmvillains/

Much of this is old news to those of us who have dabbled in Facebook/"social" games over the past couple of years, but the look "behind the scenes" is interesting.  Also, some kudos for Frontierville toward the end.

I'd love to comment on this, but... well, obviously I can't. Some guy from Zynga was commenting on it on Reddit though, which probably wasn't wise.

Replace Zynga with Microsoft or Disney in that article and it would read the same.

you guys have internal monitoring?  Or just "this shit will catch up to you one day?"  

or can you say?   :why_so_serious:

A few scattershot thoughts.

Zynga may have started by copying others, but they seem to have plenty of innovation now - at least I suspect so - they could be stealing their new innovations for all I know; there must be a million game devs out there with these shitty little games.  

Zynga definitely has a brand that will get me to try their games.  I tried the games they copied from back when they were new, and they sucked - they had no stickyness for me to keep playing them.  So I don't really care if Zynga copied them or not; Zynga's result was a superior game for me.  How evil Zynga is, or is not, is between the game devs and Zynga.  As a player, I don't care.  Zynga delivers what I want.

This stealing thing has been going on forever and is nothing new.  

I'm not a "whale" as defined in the article.  More of a leech. I eat up their game resources without paying for them.  So maybe it's me who is evil - I don't pay for the value I derive from the games.

Re: Frontierville vs. Farmville
Frontierville was a nice new shiny, and I did stop playing Farmville for a while.  Farmville grows tedious without fuel.  But then Farmville added cool stuff (crafting) which gives you more ways to get fuel which lessens the tedium.  (Plus crafting! which I am totally a sucker for).  So I play both again.  For now, anyway.  Frontierville wanes for me though.  I have enough never-ending lists of chores in real life, so days can go by without me visiting that game.

Essentially, though, they are different.  Farmville requires that I log in at particular times to harvest (raspberries!).  Frontierville is easier in that it doesn't matter when I log in, if I don't farm, and I don't have to.  Different games for different playstyles.  They're both hamster wheels - just slightly differently colors of hamster wheels.

Self-serving comments, wishful thinking, sour grapes, or a combination?

I'm trying to guess at what he means by "collapsed." I'm surprised at the number of my middle-aged female Facebook friends who pay money to play these games.  These are people who otherwise don't game.  My mostly-male Facebook friends who do otherwise game do not spend money playing these games (nor even play these games at all for the most part with a few exceptions).

I'm not sure that the older women demographic are interested in more sophistication if it means more of a time investment.  I'm not sure that this particular demographic will cross over to the sorts of games he envisions.  In other words, I think he's hoping they will but I don't think he's correct.

I didn't know that Brian Reynolds went to work for Zynga.  Surprised me.

Yeah I read that article and went wow omg someone stole an idea from someone what is the world coming to. What's slightly more interesting is there have been several people going public with this.

What's really entertaining are the non-Zynga devs like you posted, Xanth, proclaiming doom for Farmville.  :grin:

Eh, it's not so much stealing an idea, it's building an entire business model out of doing nothing but stealing ideas and not developing any of your own.  It's repugnant.  At least it sounds like they're branching out just a bit.

I don't really care for Facebook games in general, however.  They too quickly devolve into "you must have X many neighbors" type crap, and I haven't played anything yet that was worth spending money on.  I'm not the target audience; I'm still waiting for real games. 

http://seekingalpha.com/article/798231-zynga-s-real-game-could-be-fraudville

New article up on this topic now that the stock has crashed. I'm amazed by the comments on this. Some users are still calling the author out for writing hit pieces on Zynga. Having delved into their financials, I can say for a fact this guy is spot on about the financial analysis of the company and what happened.

I can't believe the number of Zynga apologists out there, considering all of the shenanigans that have come to light in the past year.

I have yet to see any writer come close to reality.

I have yet to see a random internet person even skirt around reality by mistake.

It won't take long. Within 3 years this thing will be in court.