Zynga Investment May Herald Google Games 186
A post at TechCrunch claims knowledge of large investments from Google into social game company Zynga, makers of FarmVille and Mafia Wars. The amount of money involved is not small — somewhere in the $100-200 million range — and could facilitate Google's expansion into the games market. Quoting:
"The investment was made by Google itself, not Google Ventures, say our sources, and it's a highly strategic deal. Zynga will be the cornerstone of a new Google Games to launch later this year, say multiple sources. Not only will Zynga's games give Google Games a solid base of social games to build on, but it will also give Google the beginning of a true social graph as users log into Google to play the games. And I wouldn't be surprised to see PayPal being replaced with Google Checkout as the primary payment option. Zynga is supposedly PayPal's biggest single customer, and Google is always looking for ways to make Google Checkout relevant."
Re:I feel (Score:4, Informative)
Don't know if it's important, but they had a significant impact on casual games (and possibly also micropayments in same category).
As the article states, they made games like Mafia Wars and FarmVille on Facebook, which are extremely popular.
Zynga has a higher revenue than Facebook itself.
Don't be evil (Score:4, Informative)
It would seem that "don't be evil" doesn't include not doing business with the likes of this asshole [techcrunch.com].
Re:I feel (Score:4, Informative)
They became the dominant provider of social games, to the tune of being able to pay about a thousand salaries, and are close to becoming the largest gaming company in the world (I think they only have 2 ahead of them, and they are closing in fast).
Re:Zynga are evil (Score:3, Informative)
Any transaction through PayPal gets fraud protection. My mother got caught in a phishing scheme. Her bank account and credit cards were all linked through PayPal. They contacted all the banks for her and got all the charges reversed.
Re:Google's Defense of Flash (Score:3, Informative)
This probably sheds some new light into Google's sudden defense of Flash blog post from June 29
No, no it doesn't. Why do you people refuse to accept that HTML5 is simply not ready for primetime and get over it. No, it's got to be some secret plot from microapplegooglesoft.
Re:Zynga are evil (Score:4, Informative)
So you didn't go through PayPal, and your payment processor didn't fight to protect you, so that is PayPal's fault?
PayPal and eBay are linked at the hip. eBay makes their money off sellers, but if buyers aren't happy, then it is hard to sell anything.
PayPal and eBay had tried to straddle a line of making sellers happy, and making buyers happy. They lean back and forth across that line.
I can tell you this. We spend a fortune on customer service centers. We go nuts going over customer service metrics, and we're investing even more. It is a huge focus within the company, to try and keep everyone happy. I work in IT, don't talk to customers, and I see get emails about verbatim comments from our customers.
We also ask third party companies to gather information and tell us how we're doing when it comes to customer service.
I can also tell you that when there is a dispute, PayPal doesn't just simply tell sellers to fuck off. We have groups that just focus on dispute resolution.
Re:Relevant. (Score:3, Informative)
Everything. Locking accounts to make up money that they lost. Having money stolen from you because someone decided to keep what you've sent and also file that they didn't receive it (or other types of situations like this). Massive fees. No contact information. Stealing donation money.