You have to take FarmVille and CityVille's so called "success" with a grain of salt. Social games companies don't measure success by revenue, they measure it by

You have to take FarmVille and CityVille's so called "success" with a grain of salt. Social games companies don't measure success by revenue, they measure it by daily active users (DAU). What you don't see is how much money they spend on advertising to attract users to the game. I know at one point, they were spending much more per user than the game was bringing in. You also don't see the churn rate, which is typically high in social games. There's a real possibility Zynga was never as successful as it appeared to be, from a cash perspective.