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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
by momoro 16y ago
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.
- forensic 16y agoZynga is considered the winner not because it milks the most profit per customer but because they have the most popular games. So really it's not so much about getting people to pay - it's about getting people to play. FarmVille is famous because 84 million people play it. World of Warcraft still makes more money than FarmVille, but World of Warcraft has nowhere near that userbase.
- MartinCron 16y agoThe 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 16y agoZynga'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."