6月底zynga相继关闭了Ponzi Inc和Roller Coaster Kingdom过山车王国等社交游戏。表面上看，这个只是zynga关闭了旗下两款不再适合营运的游戏，但是事实上它可能牵涉到的问题颇多，其中就包括这些推广不开的游戏和那些已经进入到生命周期晚期的游戏怎么处理的问题。

过山车王国

对于zynga这样的游戏开发者来讲，他们需要对投资方和旗下超过1000名的员工负责，因此他们在评估游戏是否可以继续营运的问题上就会更多考量该款游戏能不能带来正面的营收效益。

而在另外一个角度上，他们关闭这些游戏必然要面对其他的附带问题，这些问题包括他们与用户之间的许可协议，侵犯了用户继续使用该游戏的权利以及无法有效处理玩家们在这些游戏中存在的一些虚拟价值。要知道Roller Coaster Kingdom过山车王国依然有120万的月活跃用户，对于其他的很多游戏来讲这个用户数值已经相当不错，但是对于zynga关闭这样的游戏而言就需要应对更多的用户纠纷。

In the past week, Zynga has closed down Ponzi Inc. and now Roller Coaster Kingdom. Kyle Orland has written an interesting article for Games.com pondering the implications of the closure of such games and what it means for social games.

The first point he makes the standards for what makes a profitable game on Facebook have skyrocketed, at least for companies like Zynga. Roller Coaster Kingdom and Ponzi have 1.2 million and 221,000 players, respectively. Those are not FarmVille numbers but they are way more than the majority of games launched on Facebook this year.

If Zynga, with 1000+ employees, can’t make those numbers work, what’s the hope for the average social game developer. Either Zynga’s overhead is way too high (what have those 1000+ employees been working on lately?) or the economics behind social games have changed so that you need extremely high scale to be profitable.

His second and more interesting point is about the legal and ethical issues around closing a Facebook game with little notice. People invest time and accumulate virtual items of value in games. If you just shut down a game, that property disappears. The EULA, as Kyle Orland points out, probably covers Zynga and companies like that when they shut down and say your Ponzi points now count for some other random game. It’s bad customer relations though. One wonders how much it really costs to just run the games on cruise control and whether they should have just let the games die their natural course than cut the cord.

Regardless what’s in the End User License Agreements (“EULA”), there will be lawyers out there that will file a class action lawsuits is shutting down good but not growing social games unexpectedly becomes a trends in social games. Companies like Zynga have too much money to not be a target and the legalities behind EULA that can be changed without user’s consent are not as clear cut as lawyers may say they are. My guess is that they really have never been challenged in higher court in regards to the issues of virtual items and currency.