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Portables (Games) Social Networks Games

Zynga Aiming To Conquer Mobile Next 42

Posted by Soulskill from the you-can-run-but-you-can't-hide dept.
donniebaseball23 writes "Zynga's presence in mobile gaming is nowhere near its dominance of social gaming on Facebook, but according to chief designer Brian Reynolds, Zynga's looking to change that. '[Mobile] is something that we actively care about, think about. It's the major place where we think the future is,' Reynolds said, adding, 'The reason that Zynga isn't ginormous on mobile yet is because the friction of social networking is still high on mobile.'"
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Zynga Aiming To Conquer Mobile Next More

Zynga Aiming To Conquer Mobile Next

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  • Which mobile game will they release first? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MrEricSir ( 398214 ) on Friday March 25, 2011 @05:35PM (#35617600) Homepage

    AngryBirdsVille? CatPhysicsVille? CubeRunnerVille?

    • Insightful is deserved. Zynga is a godawful plagiarist. Makes me wonder if they'll get sued that much faster for cloning someone else's game.

      • The funny thing on the iPhone their crappy "games", such as Mafia Wars, Street Racing, Vampires, etc. are not even real games. If you can't win nor lose, you don't have a game, you have a toy! Hell, you can't even "restart" if you want to try another "style"

        • I've been using PopCaps Bejeweled 2 for like forever. I enjoy playing it on my iPhone bettter than on the Facebook site, but with every "improvement" they've come up with, useability is terrible. Don't know if this is Zynga's or PopCap's fault, but it's harder to connect, harder to keep connected, and harder just to sign in with every new iteration. I liked the original version better because it was just easier to forget the mechanics and just play.

        • You can't win or lose? So it's like World of Warcraft?

          • Exactly!

            MMO's, such as WoW, are pseudo-games; They present the illusion of being a real game when in fact they are just badly designed games.

            That's is NOT to imply sandbox games, like Minecraft, are not fun, because WoW and Minecraft certainly are fun at times but that is _precisely_ due to them being _fun_ _toys_.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by c0lo ( 1497653 )

      AngryBirdsVille? CatPhysicsVille? CubeRunnerVille?

      Nope! For domination they'll need to come with a MUD via SMS.

  • The reason that Zynga isn't ginormous on mobile yet is because the friction of social networking is still high on mobile.

    Or maybe because, even though mobile games tend to be mediocre in comparison to console titles, they're still light-years ahead of any Farmville crap.

    • are crap.

      They've had at least one mobile title (Farmville) out for a few months, and despite numerous updates, it's so buggy as to be unplayable. I challenge you to find another game on iTunes that has as many bad reviews. Whether you like Zynga games or think they're the worst thing ever, you have to admit that a game so poorly coded doesn't have much of a future.

    • You can get away with some pretty crap games on Facebook because, well, it is games on Facebook. Move on to mobiles (especially new ones) and there is more tough competition. Doesn't mean that they won't sell anything, there is a market for all kinds of stuff, but it may well mean they don't sell very much.

    • The reason is... because they aren't focussing on mobile yet. Now they are they will stomp it into submission. No ifs, just whens.

  • They can't be lazy. (Score:4, Informative)

    by FSWKU ( 551325 ) on Friday March 25, 2011 @06:00PM (#35617814)
    If they want to succeed in the mobile market, they can't afford to be lazy when it comes to Android development. As it is, the Android version of Words With Friends is nothing but a shoddy port of the iPhone title. It's bloated, slow, has no real options, push notifications seldom work (if at all), chews through your battery life like it's a Sega GameGear even when running just the background service (God help you if you leave the actual interface running), and it doesn't even use the menu button properly (read; at all)...

    If this is what they're bringing to the mobile market, no thank you.

    • " It's bloated, slow, has no real options, push notifications seldom work (if at all), chews through your battery life like it's a Sega GameGear"

      Seeing that the dalvik vm is faster than running in native code C it should fly.

  • Words with Friends (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    They have already released Words with Friends on iOS and Android, which allows cross-platform gameplay.
  • If you work at Zynga you're all going to have farmville, etc. cause let's face it some of them have got to have like farm lvl1000 or whatever by now, but if an employee has a low level at their games or has a custy little farm with are they actually wrong in not playing on facebook all day or would you be expected to have a good upstanding farm the size of Iowa?

  • Who cares? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by NeuralAbyss ( 12335 ) on Friday March 25, 2011 @06:24PM (#35618020) Homepage

    How is this relevant to 'news for nerds'? A startup with overenthusiastic PR says they're "aiming at mobile"... but no concrete plans or implementation?

    Call me back when it's something worth giving a shit about.

  • Translation: we only know how to program in flash / action script and apple does not support it.

    • I bet they either a) haven't figured out how they can trick users into spamming all their friends with invites on mobile platforms or b) have figured it out, but the users (or users' friends) revolted.

      At least as of a few months ago, Zynga obviously didn't get mobile. I used to be a huge Mafia Wars addict on Facebook. I played Mafia Wars for mobile for a while, but the mobile version wasn't connected to the Facebook version. Leveling up on one version did nothing to the other version, etc. It was pointle

  • Zynga Zynga... [youtube.com]
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVXlqmpE75U [youtube.com]
    Its on the 8th second of the vid. I always doubted his genius, but you got to hand it to him, he is a genius.

    Literal translation of what he is blabbering:
    "we will crawl upon them in million to cleanse Lybia inch by inch, house by house, Zynga by Zynga ...bla bla"

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      zinga means neighbourhood in arabic (pronounced as such in Libya. In other parts of the arab world it is pronounnced zenqa ou zinqa depending on the region)

  • Sounds like a line of dialog from "Flash Gordon".

  • I hope their mobile games allow you to compete without having to spend money.

    "Okay guys, listen up. All of you start this round with pitch forks. Except for Dan over here. He paid $50 so he gets a rocket launcher. Have fun everyone!"

  • .. my will to play any Zynga games ever again.

  • "Social games are about expressing myself in front of my friends and part of the value of investing in the play is the fact that I know my friends are going to see my farm and I'm going to help them and all my friends are going to be there." - Brian Reynolds, Zynga's Chief Game Designer

    This man is out of touch with reality. I know people who play Farmville, Cafe World, Mafia Wars and the like and their friends lists are full of people they don't know by any other means except they also play these games.

  • "the friction of social networking is still high on mobile" mean?

    I've heard and been able to parse all the corporate (mis-)management bullshitspeak until this one.

  • And why should I care about it?

    Slashdot is going crazy. The editors see the need to clarify obvious things, such as who was Alan Turing, but suddenly they post a piece about some obscure, facebook-specific crap and we're supposed to know about it?

    Facebook and all that shit is conquering our internet, and we are doing nothing about it. it's just sad. This is worst than AOL.

    http://abstrusegoose.com/347 [abstrusegoose.com]

  • I have a shiny Sony X10 Xperia touchphone, and I shudder to think how playing Farmville would even look or "feel" on this phone. It's one thing to have a 26" widescreen display and a mouse, it is a whole different world when you've got me... Fat Finger Freddy, trying to plow fields on a 5" touchscreen. Not to mention another challenge is, are they going to migrate every game into Java? Flash does not work on my phone and it not even an option to install (not that i'd want to, i'm perfectly happy without i

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