Facebook and Zynga Move Apart 64
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."
Re:Share prices... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, a significant amount. Farmville works by spamming your friends to join and send you stuff.
zynga sucks on mobile (Score:4, Insightful)
the management is morons. for years they stuck to flash to make development easier and faster and ignored mobile. i used to play mafia wars and farmville and others to kill time, but the problem was you had to do it on a computer. work blocked facebook for a long time. that meant at home i had to take out my laptop, boot it up, get into facebook and the game just to play the 15 minutes or so before they wanted money. on my iphone i just unlock the phone and play
playing the zynga games once a day meant it took months to get anything done, got boring really fast. and they cranked out new games every other month
meanwhile gameloft, rovio and others built mobile games and then added facebook and other social features and are now printing money
Re:Share prices... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Share prices... (Score:4, Insightful)
I started out playing Words With Friends on Facebook - but it's almost as if they are TRYING to annoy their users and the users' friends. Ads everywhere, constant prods to share each move, ludicrous "achievements" (that of course they want posted to your timeline)...
Using the tablet app is a much better way to go. I ignore FB game invites anymore; if I'm interested in the opponent, I'll explain how they can play against a mobile user from FB.
Re:The concept of a game company with stock.. (Score:4, Insightful)
activision and EA are publishers, they don't develop many games themselves
the games are developed by smaller studios. problem is you need to pay people before the game ships along with paying for millions of copies of games to be printed and boxed before you sell a copy. the publishers have the money for this
mobile you just send your game to apple and let them take their 30%. there is also a lot less nitpicking about graphics on mobile. i've seen more than a few cool desktop games get panned by critics because their graphics weren't the most amazing they had seen.
the lower cost of entry for mobile meant a lot more competition for zynga