Why hasn’t Zynga Inc., the social gaming company that is massively popular on Facebook, developed more games for another popular platform, Apple’s iPhone?
- Zynga CEO Mark Pincus
At Facebook’s F8 developer conference on Wednesday, Mark Pincus, chief executive of Zynga, detailed some of the reasons for holding back, despite his interest in the platform.
“We remain really interested in the iPhone,” Pincus said during a panel discussion. “We’re big believers that all this will eventually go predominantly mobile. It’s a question of when.”
But the iPhone does not provide enough easy ways for users to interact, Pincus said.
“What kept us from investing heavily in the iPhone is we haven’t seen easy enough user-to-user channels to enable a service to exist,” Pincus said. “We’re not like traditional gaming companies…We want to build users over time along their lifespan.”
The average “lifespan” of a user is 150 days for Zynga, he said, but it hasn’t been able to reach that on the iPhone, where it does have some games such as Live Poker. He is watching Apple’s soon-to-be-launched iPhone Game Center to see if that changes things.
Part of the issue is that there are not nearly as many iPhone users as there are Facebook users - about 50 million compared to 400 million, said Matt Cohler, Benchmark Capital partner.
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In addition, the iPhone has been popular for location-based services and games such as Foursquare, Gowalla, MyTown and others, but those services focus on friends within a relatively small geographic area, while social games like Zynga’s, by their very nature, seek to get as many people as possible playing, no matter where they are. However, Pincus said Zynga is looking at how location could work with its games.
The other problem with the iPhone, Pincus said, is the time it takes to get an application approved. That’s significant to a company like Zynga that constantly makes updates to games.
“The nature of releasing through the iPhone is you need to submit it and take some number of weeks, five to six weeks, to have the build approved. It’s slowed down our A/B testing. It’s A. Then five weeks later, B,” he said to some chuckles from the audience.
Pincus also discussed another much heralded new platform for developers, Twitter, saying it hasn’t provided outsized opportunities for developers yet.
“If you look at Twitter as a developer, I just don’t see the Twitter platform achieving scale for anyone but Twitter yet,” Pincus said.
No matter which platform a start-up develops for - even a popular one like Facebook - there are risks, Pincus acknowledged.
“Facebook is on a mission to provide the best social networking experience and now more broadly, social experience everywhere,” Pincus said. “They’re not on a mission to make Zynga or social gaming developers successful.”
It’s perfectly within their rights to take on developers by developing their own products, Pincus said.
“If Facebook decides it’s in their interest to build out games or gaming services or networking around gaming, then I assume they’ll do that,” he said. “I don’t think any of us should feel entitled or have taboos around it.”
Pincus said he sees Facebook and Zynga as “aligned” and expects that Facebook will further define its “rules of engagement” with developers about what it wants for itself, which will make things clearer for developers.�
“My mission is very different from Facebook,” he said. “We want to build the best social gaming experience.”
COMMENTARY:� Farmville, oh Farmville, growing crops with your friends.� Feeding the digital�chickens and pigs.�Growing digital fruits and veggies. �It was never like that when I lived on a farm in my youth.� It was dusty, I had to walk what seemed for ever as a first-grader from the farm to the road where my school bus picked me.up.� Sometimes I missed that damn bus, and had to walk back home crying because I�would miss school that day.�
We had no plumbing or water lines, or electricity either.� One of my favorite things was to fetch water for mom, because it gave us kids an opportunity to crank the handle on one of those ground water pumps.� My brother and I got a charge out of filling the toilet bowl, then taking potty and flushing it, then running down to the end of the sewer�pipe that ran undergrond to a sewage ditch a hundred fee from our farmhouse, to see if our work of art would come out the other end.�
Oh, those days.� Farmville, oh Farmville.� You kids have it so easy today.
Courtesy of an article dated April 22, 2010 appearing in The Wall Street Journal's Venture Capital Dispatch
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Posted by: BME StudioZ | 03/21/2011 at 01:05 AM
The vast application of the iphone technology and the impact created by the online games makes the leading companies to increase their gain by providing 'n' number of online and flash games.... http://www.edgonline.com/
look forward to see the future enhancements of iphone..:):)
Posted by: home theater installations | 01/26/2011 at 08:29 PM
Objective of the company is working on a relatively small number of high quality games, like the approach of Pixar animated films, which results in one blow after another.
Posted by: r4 nintendo ds | 01/18/2011 at 02:57 AM