Zynga Chief: Stealing Is Okay Cause Everybody Does It

Naw, Mark Pincus really didn't say that. He said this:

We don’t need to be first to market. We need to be the best in market. There are genres that we’re going to enter because we know our players are interested in them and because we want and need to be where players are. We evolve genres by making games free, social, accessible and highest quality.

That's from a leaked memo in response to "criticism" (read: blindingly obvious observations) that the Zynga game Dream Heights in a bald-faced piece of plagiarism of indie hit Tiny Tower.

Pincus went on to say that it's different when people do it to him, as happened when Vostu's Pet Mania ripped off Zynga's Petville, which had already ripped off Nintendogs and every other pet game on the market.

A few of you have asked how our approach to genres relates to the situation we faced with Vostu. There are rules of engagement in our industry. Companies have to respect each other’s legal and IP ownership rights in the form of copyrights and trademarks. In the case of Vostu, you can see for yourself that Vostu crossed the line and chose to use our copyrighted IP and artwork. That’s different than competing to build the best product or out-innovate us in the City category.

 That's a lot of words for a guy most famous for telling his design team, “I don’t want ****ing innovation."

h/t: Forbes

Cheap Clicks: Zynga Sexualizes Children

Click for full size

If you're wondering what the picture above shows, let me take a moment to explain it to you.

Zynga has a piece of crap "social game" called FrontierVille, which is just more of the same FarmVille compulsion-loop tripe, only with a pioneer theme. At a presentation during the SXSW Expo, Zynga's lead designer Brian Reynolds displayed this image showing something they learned from FrontierVille. See that picture of the girl with the sheep? Well, she may either be pushing it or hugging it, but a lot of people seem to think she's doing ... something else with it. (I know, it doesn't make any sense since a girl can't ... never mind.)

Anyway, Reynolds observed that this unexpected innuendo lead to "our highest post rate and our highest clickthrough rate." They attributed this to the unintended sexual innuendo. As the above slide observes, "the younger ones [meaning children who play the game] never notice any innuendo; the adults 'share' it constantly."

So they started deliberately adding things like "Scott just got wood" and "Margaret needs a few good screws." Haha! See! It's funny when we sexualize children for the amusement of adults! And waddaya know, the inhabits of our Jersey Shore culture kept reposting, responding and clicking through the posts with innuendo at a much higher rate than they did for the posts without.

Have we become such a debased culture that everything must be sexualized? When sexuality and innuendo is everywhere, then its mystique, and ultimately its appeal, becomes lost. We're raising up a hyper-sexualized generation by creating a public square wherein every piece of visual and audio stimulation is saturated in sexuality. That's not amusing or even erotic. It's just boring.

Popular culture is at an interesting point. There's a struggle going on right now between those who wish to push us further down the road of excessive sex and violence, and those who want to reclaim a more respectable tone for mass entertainment. Look at pop music, where the grotesque, derivative, perverse Lady Gaga and the sweet, talented, girl-next-door Taylor Swift have almost identical record sales. One exalts the freakish and outlandishly sexual, and the other exalts the commonplace and relatively chaste. It's the same in gaming, with the tug-of-war between the family-friendly Wii games and the uber-violence of some modern action games. These dichotomies are not hidden: in fact, they're part of the appeal, with each camp having their own advocates.

But when mature elements are deliberately added to something as apparently child-friendly as FrontierVille, the lines become blurred. Parents may overlook something like FrontierVille because it seems to be innocuous, but all the while designers are slipping in mature content under the guise of cartoon sheep and little girls.

I was disappointed to see Brian Reynolds attached to this kind of garbage. Reynolds is a talented guy who worked with Sid Meier and was the lead designer on Civilization II and Alpha Centari. Unfortunately, his own company, Big Huge Games, floundered despite doing two excellent games: Rise of Nations and Catan. I've met and interviewed Reynolds and he's a genuinely nice guy with a gift for making good strategy games. In this economy, I can't blame a man for going where the money is, and right now the money is with Zynga. I only hope some day he gets out with his dignity intact.

h/t Joystiq

EvilVille: Zynga's Culture of Corruption

from redbubble.com

This story in SF Weekly is a pretty thorough peek behind the scenes at a thoroughly disreputable company: Zynga, creators of Farmville and other tripe. The story pretty much confirmed what I'd long suspected: that it's a development house deliberately built by ripping off the work other developers. 

I can tell you one thing for certain: Zynga is despised by most people in the gaming industry, which is why company representatives never talk to the press.

The following editorial on social gaming in general and Zynga in particular is something I wrote last spring for Games Magazine.

I think all people of good will can agree on certain facts: puppies are cute, apple pie is tasty, and Farmville is a soul-sucking experience designed for maximum irritation of the highest number of people, even when those people are not playing the game. Anyone who uses Facebook must make an effort to avoid Farmville. It’s like crabgrass: kill it in one place and it pops up in another. Turn off the Farmville news feed and people send you invites and requests. Repeatedly refuse or ignore these overtures and people still post status updates reporting upon their barn-raising or sheep sheering or cow-tipping or whatever else they do in that sunken cesspool of dark and vitreous evil, deceptively festooned with pictures of cute chickens and happy little farmers.

Now you’re not even safe from Farmville when you go to buy a Slurpee. In an absolutely terrifying turn of events, Farmville publisher Zynga is looking to … (and I shudder as I even type these words) … extend the brand. First stop? 7-11, which is getting Farmville-branded ice cream and drink cups at all 7,000 of their stores throughout the busy summer months.

People, this is dire news. This prime branding spot is usually reserved for tent-pole Hollywood product like Spider-Man movies or Avatar. It tells us that Farmville is doing so well that we might just be stuck with the brand and its resulting toys, clothes, Happy Meals, and animated television shows, all of them promising codes for Farm Coins.

And Zynga is not a company you want to see with a lot of money and power. Their habit of plagiarizing games has been well-documented, costing them at least one 7-figure settlement. (Farmville itself is a straight steal from a game called Farm Town.) Their involvement in dodgy credit card and advertising schemes even generated a class-action lawsuit.

Zynga games are not designed with the player in mind, but the advertiser. The goal is to create games that need continual “servicing,” requiring users to check in frequently throughout the day and thus creating more opportunities for advertising and sales of premium content. The result is a kind of digital crack that has people actually planning their days around their beet-rotating and pig-tickling schedule, or whatever it is they do on their creepy little farms.

Some analysts are even pegging Zynga as a major economic player. A group of equity analysts called Second Shares, which estimates the values of private companies, places Zynga’s potential public value at $5 billion. This absurd number should serve as a timely reminder of the dot-com bubble, and the people (eg: equity analysts) who created it.

Granted, Zynga has about 240 million registered users on Facebook (50% of the market), but the second most successful company in the business recently sold for far less. That would be Playfish, which was purchased by Electronic Arts for $400 million. Even that amount was considered far too high by industry analysts, and merely a sign of EA’s willingness to throw a lot of money around in order to buy any kind of toehold in the social gaming market.

Zynga is certainly making money, but they’re also heavily dependent upon Farmville, which accounts for about 1/3rd of their revenues. The problem is that Farmville has almost certainly peaked, and the social gaming format is on shaky foundations. Most are barely even games: they’re graphical interfaces laid on top of rudimentary spreadsheets. In fact, even without Playfish, EA probably has a more lasting grip on social media and mobile gaming than Zynga. Their ace in the hole is the Hasbro/Milton Bradley catalog, which allows them to create social and mobile versions of Scrabble, Life, Monopoly, and other lasting brands.

For good or bad, the future of social media gaming is tied to the fate of Facebook, and even Facebook isn’t a financial rock. After 5 years of explosive growth, 2009 was their first profitable year. That growth has slowed, and will probably peak at 400 million users. Even with its current cultural ubiquity, Facebook hasn’t hit upon a reliable strategy for turning all those eyeballs into money. Games are certainly one potential source of revenue, but Zynga has already signaled their irritation with Facebook and their reluctance to share a piece of the pie. They even threatened to leave Facebook, which is ridiculous. Apart from Facebook, they have no future whatsoever.

Where is social gaming heading? It’s probably here to stay, and will become even more integrated into the Facebook experience. This is not necessarily a good thing, since most of the games are based on abysmal designs. Success will only encourage imitators, spawning even more inferior games. Facebook and other social media has some limited potential as a gaming medium (my wife and I always have a Scrabble game in progress), but no one has yet figured out how best to match that potential with a good design.