
Zynga CEO: "Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers." - EvilTrout
http://www.sfweekly.com/2010-09-08/news/farmvillains/?repost
======
danilocampos
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?

~~~
eavc
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.

~~~
danilocampos
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.

~~~
teej
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.

~~~
danilocampos
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.

~~~
teej
> 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.

~~~
mattmaroon
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.

~~~
danilocampos
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.

~~~
jshen
Bejeweled

It's social, casual, skill based, and fun.

To answer a likely question, it's social be use I want to beat my friends
scores each week

~~~
mattmaroon
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.

~~~
jshen
but I don't consider farmville gameplay fun which I think the previous
commenters were also implying.

------
lee
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.

~~~
Keyframe
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.

~~~
jashmenn
I like this. Can you give more information on the origins? E.g. in what
country/language is this proverb? What's the original language text?

~~~
kluikens
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).

<http://www.radiolab.org/2007/aug/14/>

------
momoro
I find myself entirely on Pincus' side.

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.

~~~
MartinCron
_The value in Zynga is that it beat those 300 other companies._

That's Zynga's value to Zynga. Not Zynga's value to anyone else.

~~~
michael_dorfman
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."

------
fondue
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.

~~~
JabavuAdams
Ah yes. Local maximum death by furious optimization. B .. b .. but our A/B
tests told us that this is what people wanted!

True, we don't know what other people want, but they don't know it either
(long-term).

If we always give people what they want (and nothing more), we eventually end
up at the big red orgasm button, and humanity dies.

~~~
fondue
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.

------
iamwil
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?

~~~
all
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.

------
bond
"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."

No surprises there...

------
Keyframe
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.

~~~
patio11
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.

~~~
Keyframe
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.

------
zaidf
Smart, smart move on Pincus' part.

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.

------
badmash69
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.

~~~
zackattack
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?

~~~
samtp
Those don't have to be mutually exclusive

------
ajleary
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.

------
ketanb
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.

~~~
jarek
There are a ton of number twos and threes on the internet. Quick sample: Bing,
Yahoo!, Tagged...

~~~
ketanb
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?

~~~
jarek
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.

------
code_duck
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.

------
ellyagg
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.

~~~
chc
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.

~~~
hyperbovine
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.

------
rwhitman
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

------
ethanhuynh
"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"

~~~
Psyonic
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."?

------
inerte
On a related topic, about copying and the drool over innovation, and thinking
outside the box, and whatever buzzword bingo we're on:

[http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/08/03/down-with-innovation-
up...](http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/08/03/down-with-innovation-up-with-
imitation/)

Well turns out this article wasn't submitted (I hope).
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1676407>

------
zaru
Not sure this biz model is sustainable. Especially considering how much FB is
changing and will continue to change.

------
chegra
I think the companies he copied should have had the vision to add money.

All they seem to be doing is simply find a game that has gone viral and copy
it and add money so the viral effect can be much faster.

Point to note: When you have something viral garner more investment to get it
even bigger, quicker.

------
Eight
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.

------
ruang
You can still add value to people's lives by improving on what already exists
versus creating from scratch.

