Are Zynga/Farmville Types Games Damaging the Market
Apparently, trashing Farmville was the trendy thing to do at the recent GDC (Game Developers Conference). The discussion and trashing have continued on various game developer blogs as well. The common arguments include: “these aren’t games”, “these games suck”, “this is a fad”, “these companies are scammers”, etc. The common fears include: “this is the future of the industry”, “all games will be like this eventually”, “games for core gamers are a dinosaur”, etc.
Right away, I am going to answer the question in the topic: No.
People love games. People love computer/video games. The number of people who love computer games continues to grow. The gaming industry is thriving and will continue to grow, expand, thrive, and include more and more people. Television and movies need to look out because computer/video games provide almost everything they provide, plus interactivity. (However, they don’t have to fear for their lives. Just like casual/social games won’t kill other types, television and movies provide a type of entertainment that is unique enough that many people will continue to enjoy and prefer it.)
Very few forms of legitimate entertainment get wiped out when something new comes along. The new just adds to the old, and the overall quotient of happiness increases. As I noted in a previous blog post, the Rubik’s Cube just turned 30 years old and has sold 350 million units. People still love the thing. I play Uno with one of my kids almost every day. I watch TV. I watch movies. I read books. I listen to the radio. I go for walks. I play catch. I ride my bike. The fact that we, as a species, have more and more entertainment options as our planet spins upon its axis is a GOOD THING.
Zynga is a wildly successful juggernaut that uses a variety of questionable business practices to succeed in the market with products of dubious quality. Right now, many (if not most) people think they are an unassailable titan that will continue to dominate its sector of the industry and perhaps crowd out others. Their own staff are becoming increasingly arrogant about it (perhaps as a defensive mechanism). When a Farmville developer was booed and heckled during his acceptance of the social game award at GDC, he fired back with “we’re hiring” and various other snide comments that amounted too “when you chumps are done being artists, come work for us and make money.”
I don’t know about you, but that sounds a lot like AOL to me. How many of my readers are viewing this blog while logged onto the internet through AOL? Zero? Yeah, I thought so. AOL’s primary profitable business now is TMZ if I am not mistaken (yes, that’s how far they have fallen).
The power of social games like Farmville is that it let people play games with people they like (friends, family, etc.) that they probably never thought they’d game with – ever. Parents gaming with their kids, grandparents gaming with grandchildren, and people gaming with high school friends they haven’t spoken to in 20 years are all pretty amazing things. The fact that some of the actual games that accomplished this are weak from a game design standpoint is not really the point.
Competition will come to this space, and crappy (at least in my opinion) games like Farmville won’t be able to compete. Zyngas will have to raise their standards. The same thing happened to AOL. In AOL’s case, they didn’t evolve so they died (as far as their ISP business).
Core games will continue to be made. AAA, multi-million dollar budget games will continue to be made. FPSes and fantasy MMORPGs will keep getting made. As long as there are people who like them enough to spend money on them, they will get made.
Farmville has grown the market for games, and in the end that is a good thing. This is similar to what The Sims did to help grow the gaming market – though admittedly The Sims is a high quality game in its own right. This is a good thing for us, people. Relax. 
Yup. Maybe it even helps the MMO market when the $$$ hungry investors try to copy Farmville and do not finance one WoW clone after another.
I’m not sure it’s a good idea to be so optimistic. For example, everyone said WoW’s success would grow the market. But, there’s the term “WoW tourist” that some people use to describe the tendency for WoW players to not really be interested in other games for very long. Now, you might argue that WoW is such a wonderful game that nobody wants to leave. Or, one could argue that WoW was “the first” for a lot of people so it set expectations on what they want. If it’s the latter, then people who play these “social games” are going to have skewed expectations on what gaming should be. If they burn out on these games, they may not go looking for other games.
The other problem is a lot of the big leaders in social gaming right now were able to take advantage of features of the Facebook API which are slowly being more and more restricted. There was a serious backlash against games encouraging people to “spam your friends!” So, Facebook limited how much applications could do that. Plus, the scams were a dominant force in getting some companies to grow. These are opportunities denied to other companies just starting now.
I don’t want to be a total black hole of negativity, but I think there are some reasons to be cautious. My gut feeling, after watching social games for a couple of years now, is that these are likely to be evolutionary dead ends. Not to say they won’t be highly profitable in the short term, but just like the old network portals like AOL that you mention, the whole industry might not be around as it’s supplanted by something else or people get tired and it passes as a fad.
That said, I don’t think big AAA MMOs are the future, either. I’ve not been shy about that point in the past.
Time will tell who is right. We’ll see.
I guess I always look at these things from the point of view of an indie, and to an indie these things are good opportunities.
An indie isn’t likely to make a game that reaches 80 million people. But the fact that Zynga and its ilk have opened the door for so many people means a small dev could reach tens or hundreds of thousands of people. That’s a lot more than many indies could ever hope to reach a few years ago. I read about “small” games hitting 300,000+ users, and then marvel at people blowing that off. Before WoW, 300k was a juggernaut.
There are a lot of reasons why AAA MMOs have not been able to capitalize on the way WoW grew the market. I am not sure in how much detail I want to go into my opinions on that. My briefest answer is people tried too hard to be another WoW, instead of just being another fun game that could benefit from the fact that the overall number of gamers was larger. So while games like Conan and WAR didn’t benefit from WoW, I think games like Plants vs. Zombies, Runes of Magic, League of Legends, and even all these Facebook games DID benefit from WoW.
WoW, Farmville, etc. have added a lot of gamers to the overall marketplace. Not only are these potential customers, but they are warm bodies whose acceptance of games helps gaming become a more “mainstream” form of entertainment and not “that stuff nerds do.” In my opinion, there are so many benefits to the expansion of gaming as a hobby above and beyond simply creating a genre that another company can try to wedge itself into.
Social gaming on Facebook will keep growing in the next years, also because of Facebook Credits integration, that could became crucial in Facebook’s monetization strategy, maybe even more important than advertising.
Traditional games on PC and consoles should strive to adapt to the new social media dynamics and business models promoted by publishers like Zynga. Micropayments and virtual currency could be a solution for many publishers, but what I envision as the future of games is being cross-platform, involving players on PCs, consoles, mobile phones, websites like Facebook, all playing the same game, or accessing different features of a game like in the WoW Armory App for the iPhone.
Muckbeast wrote:
I am not sure in how much detail I want to go into my opinions on that.
If you’re afraid nobody wants to hear it, let me assure you that I do. If you don’t want go on public record to be humiliated later, feel free to drop me an email to discuss this. I think it’s interesting and worth discussing at least with interested developers.
My briefest answer is people tried too hard to be another WoW, instead of just being another fun game that could benefit from the fact that the overall number of gamers was larger.
I’ll agree that too many people spent too much time trying to clone WoW, absolutely. But, then comes the question of how to appeal to (at least part of) WoW’s audience without copying WoW. Many people are happy playing WoW, so drawing them away with a different type of game isn’t easy.
I also question how much WoW really grew the market. When UO came out, many of the existing smaller developers said they had slight dips in numbers, but then more people showed up afterwards. Same with EQ. The story is different with WoW, however. Many games saw significant drops in players and no rebound. Even Meridian 59 was cannibalized to some extent by WoW.
Also, the opportunities are limited. Zynga got to their size by being at the right place at the right time. They were able to capitalize on sending out a lot of messages via the Facebook API. That feature is much more restricted now, so someone new isn’t going to be able to take advantage of that. There may still be some opportunities, but by the time the industry identifies a trend (”indie” games downloadable to consoles, iPhone games, social games, etc.) usually the bulk of the opportunity has passed.
[T]hey are warm bodies whose acceptance of games helps gaming become a more “mainstream” form of entertainment and not “that stuff nerds do.”
Most of the reports I’ve read say that people who play social games don’t consider themselves “gamers”. While I agree that mainstream acceptance of gaming would help a lot (particularly with issues of legitimacy), it may not go that way if people playing these things don’t see themselves as game players. Whether game developers claiming social games “aren’t real games” helps or hurts is another discussion.
BeAloud wrote:
…also because of Facebook Credits integration…
Actually, this is one thing that makes me think that social games on Facebook won’t have a long and glorious future. History shows that every time a platform owner has started to exert pressure on platform users in the name of profit, it becomes less and less appealing to developers. Read this article posted almost a decade ago about casual games to see one very likely future of social games on Facebook. Obviously people still make casual games (like Popcap’s Plants vs. Zombies Muckbeast mentioned), but the opportunities are hardly as wide open as they were in the past.
My thoughts.
I loved that postmortem. It is indeed interesting how so many of the problems small developers face remain the same. I also loved this at the end:
“Reality doesn’t give a shit how clever you think you are.”
Man, that is so true.
If you’re afraid nobody wants to hear it, let me assure you that I do. If you don’t want go on public record to be humiliated later, feel free to drop me an email to discuss this. I think it’s interesting and worth discussing at least with interested developers.
I’m not terribly afraid of being wrong. It has happened before.
. I was worried about a combination of people not being interested and derailing the conversation here. If there’s interest, that eliminates the first concern. I can eliminate the second concern by going into that issue in its own blog post.
Great point about how WoW did indeed “consolidate” a lot of the market, leaving the other players to suffer. Threshold lost 50% of its users to WoW, and over time only 25% of those have come back. But I do think WoW also expanded to include new people. While newer MMOs have not really benefited, I think the gaming market as a whole has.
Most of the reports I’ve read say that people who play social games don’t consider themselves “gamers”.
That doesn’t surprise me. Do we need to come up with a 7 Stages of Admitting You Are a Gamer? These people are in denial at the moment. But surely they are only 1 or 2 more games away from moving towards acceptance, right? Whether they admit it or not, they ARE gamers now, and eventually some, most, or all will acknowledge that I think.
RE: Facebook Credits
This is an interesting one. I haven’t read much about this, but it has always amazed me how Facebook kinda sat back and let these companies make so much money off their customers without getting a cut. Then again, I just read recently that Facebook is on track to earn between $1-1.5 billion this year. And that is with a far smaller staff and potentially lower costs than Zynga. Given that, maybe they are doing pretty well without trying to dip into the wallets of the application makers. If that is true, then getting greedy and trying to do so anyway may have exactly the effect Brian mentions – sending the app developers packing.
If Facebook gets greedy, I could see developers move more in the direction of what PopCap does. They have a baby version of Bejewled on Facebook, and it is designed primarily to shuttle you over to PopCap’s site to buy and play games. They use Facebook as a promotional tool more than a gaming platform. That may be where more app/game developers move if Facebook wants to take a 30% cut of their income.
Yes, I agree overall, think of Farmville as gaming Nursery or Pre-school (like the old one-game handhelds), prepping people nicely for more in-depth experiences in future. Perhaps they’ll continue with a Wii at first, then a DS and finally maybe a PC game or a xbox / ps3.
In what direction do you guys see Zynga going?
Will they keep churning out the same stuff?
Will new games get significantly better as far as actual game design and quality control?
Will their games continue to be predominately played through Facebook?
Will they continue to get their game ideas by outright copying some smaller company’s game and then using their marketing/polish to crowd them out? (Farmville, Mafia Wars, CafeWorld, etc.).
Muckbeast wrote:
I can eliminate the second concern by going into that issue in its own blog post.
I look forward to it.
In what direction do you guys see Zynga going?
I suspect that unless what they’re doing suddenly stops being wildly profitable, they’ll keep doing what they’re doing now. When you’re making piles of money, a sort of conservatism sets in. Messing with things means potentially killing the goose laying the golden eggs.
The game design may improve, but for now it really doesn’t have to in order to remain on top. From what I’ve heard from other game developers, they have been bringing in people to improve games.
Beyond that, not sure. It’ll be interesting to see how things go at any rate.
“I suspect that unless what they’re doing suddenly stops being wildly profitable, they’ll keep doing what they’re doing now. When you’re making piles of money, a sort of conservatism sets in. Messing with things means potentially killing the goose laying the golden eggs.”
I agree with what Brian says, the social gaming phenomenon will be the same as the casual gaming phenomenon was / is. Churn out the same stuff, clone any new winning formula’s, boast about the millions of people that play them and why everyone and his cat should be making them and then consolidation and higher cost and finally social games become a commodity (if they aren’t already).
I see these “social games” as a continuation of the trend started by WOW. That is simply put a race for the bottom where players are given greater apparent “rewards” for ever more pointless and crappy gameplay – and various ways to show them off to friends. Incidentally if I was Blizzard I’d be very worried about Farmville because it basically beats WOW at it’s own game – even easier gameplay with more social elements.
My viewpoint is similar to Brian’s in a way. If these facebook games actually introduced players to deeper gameplay over time and had the capability to act as a “bridge” into more in depth gaming then I wouldn’t think them a bad thing. But I don’t see this happening – the only thing Farmville players seem interested in is more of the same.
I also think Zynga causes more problems then people realize. There’s the fact they set the expectation for poorly designed games, but beyond that is the whole scam factor. IMO someone who has gotten burned by one of those “free quiz” Farmville offers turning into a monthly fee is far less likely to trust any gaming company with things like microtransactions or subscriptions. Get the scammers out of the way and maybe social gaming has the potential to develop into something useful.
“I look forward to it.”
Seconded. Interest ++
I have little use for these Facebook games, but I don’t mind that they serve a niche other than my own. I don’t think they will help expand the market in a way that will help me, since I’m not one for following the herd (it’s dangerous and boring), but it’s similar to the “dress up” games on the DS. Someone likes them, more power to ‘em. I’m not too fussed about whether they are “real” games or not. They might affect what grandiose game design plans I have in tangential ways, but they aren’t my future as a gamer or a dev. Live and let live, I say.
I may be very drunk right now, but I have to say: I do not think these people are gamers, nor will they ever consider themselves gamers.
Let us take Frontierville. There is no way to lose this game, and it consists mostly of clicking on random shit, and looking at colorful art.
Now let us take Diablo, also a game about clicking on shit. The pretty art will come in its Diablo 3 incarnation (that Frontierville players would not be able to play due to a lack of an radeon 8800+ era vid card).
Now, I posit, that, there (not their drunk man) is never a bridge that can be built between these two. Diablo is, sort of, a game. There is “failure”, even though it’s never been more than a few minutes worth of set back. While Frontierville is a happy carebear panda land where you clobber snakes and foxes without their venomous venom ever harming you. The west was a thousand times more fatal in the Oregon Trail.
So we’re left of the reality of the situation: Frontierville players would love the Diablo pinata simulator, but they will never play it, because if they would play it, they’d be playing it right now.
I will completely agree it doesn’t harm anything however. They’re only worth thinking about if you yourself intend to make a Facebook flash game – and the only thing I get out of it is “Diabloville” would have to handle Death as an ~eight second dazed and knocked out condition with very very very simple click controls.
Oh, now I am kind of bummed out as I am less intoxicated and optimistic than I began this missive.
I think there is definitely a transition.
My wife’s mother is a 60+ old woman who got into gaming in the last few years. She started with the usual stuff – solitaire, then spider solitare, and other super casual stuff.
Lately she has moved onto stuff like Plants vs. Zombies and even Age of Empires.
So there are indeed people who move from super casual stuff to more serious games given the right level of interest and transition.
A recentish article on Zynga for those interested in such things:
http://www.sfweekly.com/2010-09-08/news/farmvillains/
I read that article a few weeks ago. While it confirmed a lot of random things I’d heard from people in the industry, it was still shocking.
I still don’t understand how in the hell Brian Reynolds could work there. Yeah yeah, the money, but surely he could make a lot of money working on actual quality games somewhere, right?
Thank you for the auspicious writeup. It in reality was once a entertainment account it. Look complicated to more added agreeable from you! However, how could we keep in touch?
I have added some pictures related to this on Flickr
Dear AV, you will not have a right of derogatory comments! Have fun. kisses erreurs de blackberry
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