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芝加哥太阳报:Zynga马克·平卡斯开创Facebook游戏帝国

发布时间:2011-03-28 15:04:13 Tags:,,

每天有1300万的Facebook用户在《FarmVille》访问虚拟农场,播种和收割庄稼,购买和养殖牲畜。有2000万的用户在《CityVille》创建虚拟城市。有500万用户在《FrontierVille》开发西部。有200万用户在《黑手党战争》格斗,互相“袭击”,各组“家庭”。

这些游戏都是出自Zynga之手,该公司是由生长于芝加哥的马克·平卡斯(Mark Pincus)创立和经营的,马克·平卡斯现年45岁。

Mark Pincus

Mark Pincus

据AppData显示,Zynga作为Facebook最大的社交游戏开发商,在全球范围内拥有近5800万的日活跃用户,总用户数量达2.5亿,游戏邦发现其中有25%的用户来自美国。

在线游戏开发商认为社交媒体是可以大赚钱的平台。游戏虽为免费,但玩家会为了快速晋级而花钱,或者购买商品、配件来装扮他们的虚拟资产。虽然Zynga没有透露营收,但据《华尔街日报》报道,公司2010年的收益为8.5亿美元,其中净利润为4亿美元。

游戏邦获悉,据市场专家预估,Zynga的估值高达100亿美元。《福布斯》杂志估算平卡斯的个人财富达10亿美元。

马克·平卡斯家中有5个兄弟姐妹,他是唯一的男孩,从小就为《Pacman》着迷,10岁开始玩《Ms. Pacman》、《弹珠台》(Pinball)以及雅达利(Atari)公司的相关产品。

平卡斯表示,“我的朋友和家里人都开玩笑说我把青春花在了电子游戏上。谁会想到它最后变成我的事业?”

成功并非一蹴而就。游戏邦获悉,平卡斯最初成立过3家互联网公司,其中1家最后破产。然后他才意识到父亲常告诉他的那句话再正确不过:创办自己的公司,创办自己感兴趣的公司。

平卡斯的父亲是特德·平卡斯(Ted Pincus),特德成功自创了企业并购咨询公司Stevens Gould Pincus,并担任《太阳报》专栏作家多年。

如今,小平卡斯得到了硅谷大人物的亲身指导:KPCB风险投资公司(Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers)的约翰·杜尔(John Doerr),其因成功投资amazon.com和Google等网络品牌而远近闻名,及威廉·戈登(William “Bing” Gordon),其之前为电子游戏开发商EA的创意总监,如今其为克莱纳-珀金斯公司的合伙人之一。此外,游戏邦发现戈登还是Zynga的股东。

平卡斯的妻子艾莉森刚为其诞下两个双胞胎女儿。平卡斯从小身边就充斥着竞技游戏玩家。他将创造的成功归根于从小在林肯公园一带长大,以及深受宪章根本学校(Francis W. Parker )的熏陶。

马克·平卡斯某次在父亲家里接受采访时表示,“我以为大学毕业,读完商学院后,我会回到芝加哥,但它确实比不上纽约这个大都市,我就是在那里开始的事业的。我时时刻刻都认为自己是土生土长的芝加哥人。”

他并不排除重回故乡的可能。

他深爱这这座城市,而且Zynga发展势头也很不错,他半开玩笑表示,“芝加哥颇有姿色,令我们为之倾倒。”

平卡斯表示,老实说,Zynga有可能在这里成立设计工作室。

他表示,“如果我们找到合适的团队,我们可能会在芝加哥成立工作室。Zynga现有7个工作室,分别在奥斯汀、巴尔的摩、波士顿、纽约、西雅图和达拉斯,其中达拉斯有2个工作室。Zynga共有1500名员工,旧金山总部有1000名,其余分布于各个工作室,还有海外办事处,Zynga如今已朝海外发展。”

平卡斯1985年离开芝加哥,开始求学之路,先在宾夕法尼亚大学沃顿商学院获得学士学位,而后又在哈佛商学院读MBA。

1995年,他创办了互联网广播公司Freeloader,公司成为网页导航的首创,随后又开创了Support.com,这是一家软件公司,2000年上市,后来又创建了早期的社交网站Tribe.net。除此之外,游戏邦发现他还是Friendster,Napster和Facebook的早期投资者。

2006年春Tribe.net破产,平卡斯认为其将过多精力放在网站创建和网站运营上,没有为用户提供优质的游戏体验,随后平卡斯买回了公司,转手卖给路由器制造商思科系统公司(Cisco)。

也就是那时,平卡斯尝到了公司受控于他人的惨痛教训,他将该失误比作“千刀万剐”,他仅是公司的决策者之一,无法控制公司的发展方向。

“Facebook创始人马克·扎克伯格(Mark Zuckerberg)谈到了为‘媒介’而开发,就是针对互联网本身,而不是将互联网视为过滤现有内容的渠道。只有推出适应互联网作品,公司最终才能取得胜利。”

所以平卡斯2007年成立了Zynga,游戏邦获悉该公司的名字来自于平卡斯最喜爱的斗牛犬,旨在开发有价值的游戏。公司的第一个作品是《Zynga Poker》。

他表示,“我们常常问自己,‘怎样才能创办最好的鸡尾酒派对,吸引大量朋友来参加。”游戏邦发现,《Zynga Poker》玩家可以赢得舞蹈幻术、马提尼酒和幸运兔的脚,在牌桌上扮酷。

平卡斯认为在线游戏障碍太多,而《Zynga Poker》恰恰消除了这些障碍:Xbox游戏得有复杂的控制台,同时朋友还得聚集到在一起,而且当时社交网站还没有让人感兴趣的游戏。

在开发《Zynga Poker》的过程中,平卡斯发现,多数玩家愿意掏钱增加其在游戏中的赌注。

2008年3月7日,Zyng推出了虚拟商品扑克筹码。这样一来玩家可以更快晋级,寻找更高等级的对手。游戏邦获悉,筹码推出第1天,Zynga就创收3万美元。

他表示,“我们起初推出了5美元的筹码组合,接着又推出了15美元、30美元、50美元和100美元的筹码组合,购买用户源源不断。”

他表示,“从用户数量来看,《Zynga Poker》是全球规模最大的扑克游戏。”

公司凭借《FarmVille》招揽了新用户,游戏的用户群比最初的Facebook用户年长,这些用户希望通过游戏寻求乐趣,静静体验个15分钟,缓解生活的压力。

平卡斯表示,他觉得未来网络世界的成功依赖于推出好产品。

“我的导师,戈登和杜尔,使我有了互联网财富的概念。是互联网让我们今天有机会创造可能影响未来几十年的应用。互联网让人们彻底忘记过去的生活,同时成为人们赖以生存的工具。”

平卡斯最后表示,“Zynga开创的世界让我很享受。”(本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,转载请注明来源:游戏邦)

Mark Pincus creates an empire with games designed for Facebook

Every day, some 13 million Facebook users tend to their virtual farms, sowing and reaping crops, buying and raising livestock, in FarmVille. Twenty million build virtual cities with CityVille, 5 million pioneer the West with FrontierVille and 2 million fight Mafia Wars, ordering “hits” on each other and building their “families.”

They are playing games created and owned by Zynga, a company created and run by Chicago native Mark Pincus, 45.

Zynga, the biggest social-games developer for Facebook, has about 58 million daily active users worldwide and 250 million players in total, according to AppData.com. About a quarter of the players are in the United States with the rest overseas.

The online game developer has shown the world one way to make big money off of social media. The games are free to play, but players spend real money to advance more quickly through the games or to buy products (such as a $20 tractor) or accessories to dress up their virtual properties. Zynga declines to comment on revenues but The Wall Street Journal has reported that the company made $400 million in profit in 2010 on $850 million in revenue.

Market experts value the San Francisco-based company as high as $10 billion.

Forbes magazine estimates Pincus’s wealth at $1 billion.

The only boy among five children, he grew obsessed with Pacman, Ms. Pacman, Pinball and Atari starting at age 10.

“My friends and family joked that I wasted my youth playing videogames,” Pincus said. “Who knew it would end up being a career?”

Success wasn’t immediate. He started three Internet-related businesses, including one that fell into bankruptcy, before deciding what his dad had always taught him was true: Own your own business, and build it as the house in which you want to live.

Pincus is the son of Ted Pincus, who built his own successful mergers-and-acquisitions consulting firm, Stevens Gould Pincus, and who for years has written a business column for the Sun-Times.

Now, the younger Pincus is getting personal mentoring from Silicon Valley’s biggest names: John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, famous for directing venture capital funding to web successes such as amazon.com and Google, and William “Bing” Gordon, former chief creative officer at Electronic Arts, the videogame developer, and now a partner at Kleiner Perkins. Gordon sits on Zynga’s board of directors.

Pincus, a new parent with wife Allison of fraternal twin daughters, grew up in a family of competitive game players. And while heeding his father’s business advice, he credits his Lincoln Park upbringing and Francis W. Parker schooling with much of his creative success.

“I always thought I would end up here [in Chicago] after college and after business school, but it never matched up with where my career was going,” Mark Pincus said in an interview at his father’s home here. “I have always considered myself a Chicago person.”

He isn’t exactly ruling out returning.

“Chicago could make a play for us,” he said, half tongue-in-cheek because of his long-standing love affair with the city and Zynga’s undeniable growth.

More realistically, Pincus said, Zynga could set up a design studio here.

“If we found the right team, we’d love to start a studio in Chicago,” he said, noting that Zynga operates seven studios — in Austin, Baltimore, Boston, New York and Seattle, and two in Dallas. Zynga’s 1,500 employees include 1,000 at San Francisco headquarters and the rest spread among the studios and worldwide as the company expands overseas.

Pincus left Chicago in 1985 to get his bachelor’s at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and his MBA at Harvard Business School.

In 1995, he started Freeloader, a

web navigation pioneer, followed by Support.com, an enterprise software company that went public in 2000, and Tribe.net, an early social network. While doing so, he became an early investor in Friendster, Napster and Facebook.

After Tribe.net went bankrupt in spring 2006 — Pincus attributes it to spending too much time on getting the site up and running and not enough on giving people “cool games to play” — Pincus bought back the company and sold it to router maker Cisco.

By that time, Pincus said, he recognized his “painful pattern” of giving control of his companies to others, a mistake he likens to “death by 1,000 cuts” and being made a lobbyist instead of controlling the business’ direction.

“Mark Zuckerberg [Facebook’s founder] has talked about building for ‘the medium’ — the Internet itself — rather than treating the Internet as a channel through which to funnel existing content. Only companies that organically build something get it right and succeed.”

So in 2007, Pincus started Zynga — named after his late beloved bulldog — with the intent of doing something organic. The first effort was poker.

“We asked ourselves, ‘How do we create the best cocktail party where you and your friends want to be?’ ” he said. Zynga Poker let players win dancing gnomes, martini glasses and a lucky rabbit’s foot so they could be cool at the poker table, he said.

Poker was created to eliminate what Pincus believed to be too many barriers to online game-playing: Friends had to be together in the same place with a complicated controller for Xbox play, and no one was offering compelling game-playing on social networks.

In the process of experimenting with Zynga Poker, Pincus learned that players would pay real money to increase the game’s stakes.

On March 7, 2008, Zynga Poker launched the sale of virtual goods — poker chips — so players could more quickly advance to vie against better rivals. The first day’s take totaled $30,000.

“We started with $5 chip packages, and then we tried packages for $15, $30, $50 and then $100. No one stopped buying,” he said.

“Our poker game is the biggest in the world by any order of magnitude,” he said.

With FarmVille, the company attracted a new audience — people who were older than initial Facebook users, and who crave fun and 15 minutes of unexpected play and relief in their lives.

The lesson is that future web success stories will be based upon building the best product experience, Pincus said.

“My mentors — Bing and Doerr — gave me this concept of an Internet treasure. It’s the chance we have today of creating something that could matter in a couple more decades — a service that people cannot remember life before and cannot imagine life without.”

Said Mark, “With Zynga, I’ve built a house I want to live in.” (Source:Suntimes)


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