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Game Over: Zynga Shuts Down PetVille And 10 Other Titles
- twiceaday 14y agoGood.
- programminggeek 14y agoYou know what the right play on Zynga was? Cashing out and putting the money elsewhere. Instead, Zynga is the classic case of thinking that growth is basically infinite and there is unlimited demand. There are a limited number of gamers willing to buy virtual goods on Facebook games, and there is nothing special that Zynga does on mobile that other companies don't do as well or better. Take the money and run. Now it might be too late.
- ojbyrne 14y agoIsn't that what upper management did? At least to the extent legally possible.
- loceng 14y agoWell, can't really know for sure, though from the outside it didn't really look like there was much innovation outside the addictive game model they first implemented. And then they got into defensive mode buying up competitors / talent, however individual developers can always do things cheaper and create breakaway games that will slowly take from the pie.
- Tloewald 14y agoWere they in any way connected with kingdom of loathing? If not, then their only innovation was integrating kingdom of loathing with nicer graphics and facebook (i.e. not the game mechanics or business model).
- zck 14y agoNo; Kingdom of Loathing is run by Asymmetric Publications (http://asymmetric.net/ http://asymmetric.net/), which is only a few people: http://asymmetric.net/people.html http://asymmetric.net/people.html . And if Zynga didn't steal game mechanics or the business model from KoL, what did they take? While KoL was an early browser-based game, it certainly wasn't the first (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiplayer_browser_games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiplayer_browser_ga...).
- jkat 14y agoI'm a big gaming fan, and it seems like they could have explored and expanded the world of casual gaming; but they instead focused on a cash grab.
- hdra 14y agoyeah... good ol' times where I associated casual games with companies such as Playfish instead of Zynga... You know, Zuma, Diner Dash, Sally's Salon.. Where the companies doesn't actually try to get you addicted to their games..
- pebb 14y agoTime to issue stock buyback to return money to shareholders and shut the company down.
- robertelder 14y agoI started playing farmville over a year ago to learn about what made Zynga so successful. Farmville is the lowest quality game I have ever seen. For a while, every time you loaded the game there was a php array of what looked like debug information echoed to the page just before the game loaded. There were numerous times where I would queue up a bunch of work in the game, only to get a message saying that "Farmville has been enhanced, please refresh to continue". Refreshing the page would mean I have to click on all those trees again. Every time you load the game you need to close about 5 promotional offers attempting to get you to buy farm cash, or invite your friends to play the game. The game employs emotionally manipulative tactics to get people to use farm cash (in game currency you pay for). Every once in a while you will get a pop up with a picture of a sad horse which needs shelter. It will run away if you don't feed him now! There are also a lot of annoying promotions that pop up and you are not given the option dismiss them. The only button provided is "Start now" or "Tell me more...". The game if full of bugs, and occasionally has pop up windows that have no text and empty buttons. I attempted to log in for the first time in 4 months today, and I could not play the game because it lags so bad despite my having a new computer. To be fair my map has all possible spaces filled with lime trees, so that is where the lag comes from.
- samstave 14y agoI respect your efforts. It would be great to see a spectrum analysis of all their games in this way, if for nothing more than to show, holistically, how bad of a company Zynga is... To be fair, I'd like to see the same for the KixEye games as well - as they are making money hand over fist (according to a good friend who works there).
- slig 14y agoSee "What I Learned From FarmVille - So You Don’t Have To Play It" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1940778 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1940778
- justinhj 14y agoIn my experience Zynga have amongst the most polished of the social games. I've encountered occasional bugs but nothing like you're describing here. If what you describe is typical how do you explain their huge audience?
- alexholehouse 14y agoWith these kinds of games I really surprised Zynga didn't provide a more graceful wind down. As the article suggests, there must be HUGE numbers of people with real emotional attachment to their characters/pets, who almost by definition are Zynga's most loyal customers. SURELY a business decision which exclusively hurts those who are stakeholders in the games you produce is, from a long term perspective, just a horrible move for customer loyalty and reputation. If I'd put 4 years into a pet on Petville, only to have the game basically deleted from under my nose, there is no way I'd ever become involved in anything Zynga does again. [Disclaimer, I've never actually played any Zynga games, so this is based on second hand conversions/observations]
- general_failure 14y agoMost of the comments are made up.
- patio11 14y agoIt's possible that some of these games had paying user retention numbers such that maintaining customer loyalty among the holdouts was not a hard requirement. I don't have a convenient way to look up MAUs at the moment, but many apps languish at say 10k. That would imply a few hundred paying customers. The majority of them would be worth whole tens of dollars in LTV. One of my rare compliments to Zynga: they aren't stupid and it is highly, highly unlikely that the live teams' business analysts made a worse decision based on the data than an outsider would make based on a press release.
- robryan 14y agoI think it would be a straight numbers decision as you guess. A lot of companies would worry about how this would impact those high value and long term customers and how it could effect retention in other games and future projects. I think Zynga is passed that point now though (if that ever was a concern for them, they have never really been a games company a rational person would have a strong connection to). Pretty much all the big name MMOs released in the past 10 years have gracefully downsized and maintained maintenance for the player base.
- raganwald 14y agoThe article was amazingly sympathetic to Zynga's management. Almost as if... Hmmm... Almost as if... Someone sent them a press release and they reprinted it verbatim in exchange for an exclusive interview or an advertising buy.
- ChuckMcM 14y agoNow now, are you saying coverage on Tech Crunch can be bought? I'm shocked I tell you, shocked!
- SimHacker 14y ago"Your winnings, sir." (Transfers 1,000,000 Facebook credits to Tech Crunch's account.)
- saosebastiao 14y agoI thought it was pretty jarring. If there is anything the world should be able to agree on, it is that Pincus is an insufferable * and a terrible manager.
- kitcar 14y agoAny thoughts as to why they didn't sell the titles rather than shuttering them? I'm thinking maybe they share code across games and don't want it in outside hands, or maybe they weren't revenue positive, or perhaps don't want to hand over any portion of their user database to a competitor. Any other ones I am missing?
- anatari 14y agoBecause it makes very little business sense to do so. The upside of selling is near zero because it would not make a dent in their bottom line or their future outlook, while there are many downsides to selling, some of which you have mentioned.
- mistercow 14y ago>But Zynga’s share price got decimated over the past year. Well no, not really. I mean, yes, I guess it technically did. Then it got decimated again. And then it got decimated 12 more times.
- monochromatic 14y agoI feel like I'm fighting a losing battle with "decimate." Glad to see there's somebody else on HN still fighting the good fight though.
- hnriot 14y agoWhat are you trying to say? The word was used quite correctly.
- nemeth88 14y agoDecimate means to remove 1 out of 10, so a decimated share price would have fallen by only 10%, technically. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimation_(Roman_army)#Current_usage_of_the_word http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimation_(Roman_army)#Current...
- eropple 14y agoYou are not even "technically" correct and I have to say it's really annoying seeing this come up again and again in every HN thread where someone uses the word. Even setting aside that, yes, usage dictates meaning in English, the OED has included the definition against which you rail for 350 years. You're wrong. And you're the worst kind of wrong: pedantically wrong. Please stop.
- monochromatic 14y agoIt's basically a skunked term at this point. No matter which sense you use it in, some subset of your readers is going to take umbrage. There are other, better, words available that can take its place.
- andrewcooke 14y ago"Zynga’s share price is down 3.52% to $2.33 from its $10 IPO price a year ago" ???
- mmahemoff 14y agoslight oversight there. From the comments: Should be 76.7%. 3.52% was the amount it was down on Friday, December 28th, 2012.
- ChuckMcM 14y agoAs an operations guy I find this really interesting. What I find interesting is the cost vs revenue of these games. Obviously to me there is a bunch of up front costs, art assets, game play design, etc. But once you've got the basic HTML5 code going, and the art assets in place, what are your on-going costs? Clearly there is going to be bandwidth at scale its like $2 - $3 per megabit per month, you've got power/cooling in a colo, so that's going to cost you maybe $3K/month for a 42U rack's worth of servers. And presumably you've got a couple of opsen types tending and feeding that rack. But they are split across say 100 racks so 1/100th of their salary/benefits per month, lets call it $160/month [1]. So lets give the game 500Mbits of bandwidth a month (that is 4.3TB of data transfer per day) We can put 20 beefy servers in our 42U rack with 20TB of disk space and 1/2TB of flash in each (we do this at Blekko)So 400TB of disk space and 10TB of flash, and if you wanted 3.8TB of RAM (192GB/server) and 480 threads of execution. Now I'm making a huge assumption here, and so I'm calling it out, but my assumption is that the "game" is essentially a front end on a database, where player actions become database transactions, and those transactions show up as changes in the game 'world', further those transactions are both shared (everyone in the game can see them) and private (only you see the changes). So a system that is slightly less beefy than our setup (the Sun setup) gets 10M transactions/minute in the TPC-C benchmark [2]. At that level it suggest our stack-o-servers might support 1 - 2M players. So our monthly cost is on the order of $6,500 and we're hosting say 1.5M players. That means we need to extract something like a half cent per month out of those players in order to pay for running the hardware. For a gross margin of 50% that is about .86 cents. I may be completely off here somewhere, please point out my math or configuration errors! It seems like one could essentially run a game 'forever' until that average number got too low and then you would have to wind it down, but one wonders about how hard it is get get someone to pay a penny a month. I did leave out the maintenance (warranty) cost of the servers, a recent quote from a server vendor had 'everything covered, onsite tech' for $175/server/month. So if you wanted to add that in then there would be another $3,500/month to cover. It looks like a license to print money but clearly there is something here that sucks all that money away. Curious what it is. [1] That is two ops people with a combined salary/benefit package costing $200K/year or 16K/month which divided by 100 (1/100th of their work) is $160. [2] http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_perf_results.asp?resulttype=cluster&version=5%&currencyID=0 http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_perf_results.asp?result...
- sanarothe 14y agoThis is really sketch, in my opinion; There are people with hundreds of dollars invested into their facebook game microtransactions. "Take the money and run" to a whole new level...
- sanarothe 14y agoThis is really sketch, in my opinion; There are people with hundreds of dollars invested into their facebook game microtransactions. "Take the money and run" to a whole new level...
- pixie_ 14y agoThey need to figure out a way to persist these games. Either sell them off, or open source them or something. It makes me rage when companies lock in users to a game and shutdown the servers.
- phaus 14y agoTheir games pretty much amount to marginally interactive spam. I don't think that too many people who are smart enough to code would be willing to put in the effort to continue developing them, because the games don't have enough depth to capture an intelligent person's attention. Also, it's doubtful that the company would be interested in open sourcing them, because they don't really care about gaming or gamers, they just saw a quick way to make money. There's nothing wrong with having money be your top priority (to each their own) but in Zynga's case it's obvious that it's their only priority.
- pixie_ 14y agoYou really don't see anything wrong with making money a top priority? Forgoing all other responsibilities. Do you believe a company should be responsible for more than just profits?
- phaus 14y agoI personally don't advocate it, but everyone has their own prerogative. I really like seeing such companies get crushed by the market, but many of them seem to be successful.
- Jare 14y agoZynga has actually open sourced a bunch of stuff. Nothing earth shattering, but there's good stuff there. See https://github.com/zynga https://github.com/zynga and their tech blog http://code.zynga.com/ http://code.zynga.com/
- phaus 14y agoThanks. I guess I stand corrected on this count.
- alan_cx 14y agoSo, these are virtual pets and what-not, that people have kept "alive" and happy for years, right? So, is it really that hard to port the player's data in to a stand alone desk top application that at least the character can sort of be preserved in, or more? Perhaps let the open source minded folk perhaps keep "feeding" the application? Or something like that. I would imagine that players would be happy enough to pay a reasonable amount for that. Or perhaps do a data dump for players so that some representation of the character exists. I kinda think developers should have something like this in mind before they start, especially where kids and money are concerned.
- zacharycohn 14y agoThat's nice from the human interest angle, but when it comes down to it Zynga is a publicly traded company now. I don't recall if they're profitable or not at the moment, but they are hemorrhaging shareholder trust. They could either spend more time (and money) on letting people port their virtual corn to a local machine.. or they could cut the product and immediately start moving toward profitability. When your stock price is $2.33... it really isn't much of a choice.
- djt 14y agoThey may be doing this to switch customers to their other titles before a new competitors game comes out
- Zoophy 14y agoUgh, I hate how the mobile TC website divides pages in multiple sub-pages.
- atesti 14y agoOf course what Zynga created cannot really be respected as or compared with proper games, but it's still sad that it's gone. How will the Moma put games like Farmville (which are an important piece of history of computers and FaceBook and stock markets) in an exhibition once the servers have been turned off? Makes one really want to buy Sim City 5 (which will do calcuations in the cloud and not be playable without internet connection). Today EA shut down games like Fifa 2011!
- hornbaker 14y agoIf you're a dev with Flash experience from the PetVille team looking for an opportunity with a much smaller (but profitable) company, please get in touch with me. Remote work ok.
- lucian303 14y agoYeah, predictable three ... now four years ago. Zynga and the rest. Can you say bubble burst when FB finally goes down?