作者：Tadhg Kelly

几年前大家都在谈论“休闲”游戏，现在他们开始谈及“社交”游戏。主流开发商近来营收可观。本文并非主要谈论Zynga，而是旨在探究其背后的商业模式，该公司无法避免的威胁，以及其作为社区标准成员未来发展态势。随着Zynga的发展，其余社交游戏公司也会迎头赶上。

首先要说的是运作Zynga的人士都非常精明和求胜心切。他们通过把握游戏发展趋势，快速复制，然后最大化Facebook传播功能，促使公司在竞争中处于优势地位。目前Zynga游戏的MAU（月活跃用户）是尾随其后竞争者的4倍（游戏邦注：此为2009年12月18日标准）。查看Appdata.com上的玩家分布图，你不免会有“报告参数存在失误吧”的质疑，这完全可以理解。

理解这点有关“社交游戏”的论述也很重要：多数社交游戏并非真正具有社交性。他们大多是搭载社交网络的单人或多人游戏，以此快速吸引玩家。被行业称作“社交游戏”的内容更准确来说应该是“病毒式传播游戏”。

多数病毒式传播游戏开发商的焦点是充分利用发展趋势。发展趋势随玩家厌倦感大起大落，留存率是王道，开发商把大部分时间用于提醒玩家体验，邀请好友参与游戏，在个人主页发布游戏消息以及其他旨在促进玩家回访的活动中。病毒式传播游戏借助各种能够捕获玩家注意力的渠道。和第三方游戏发行商一样，他们依赖平台所有者（游戏邦注：主要是Facebook）以及平台提供的市场条件。

这促使这些开发商通常只着眼当前。病毒式传播游戏是简单克隆作品的较量之地，他们推崇交叉营销策略和极限策略旨在促使玩家回访游戏，快速跟进下个发展趋势。诸如Zynga之类的病毒式传播游戏开发商鲜少致力开发深刻或丰富游戏体验，因为该市场需要的不是这些内容。但缺乏深度正是病毒式传播游戏失去众多成功机会的原因所在。

Zynga此前从俄罗斯风投公司DST（其在Facebook也握有少量股份）融资1.8亿美元，这说明行业已发生变化。这里存在的一个重要问题是：这是否是消亡的开始？还是只是初期的结点？

产品差异化

“让我先说明：《FarmVille》DAU（日活跃用户）高达2800万，而紧随其后的《Farm Town》的DAU却只有500万，且毫无增势，这定存在某些原因，是吧？若开发商们只是在互相效仿，那为何有些能够成功，有些却惨遭失败？”

以上是马克·平卡斯在某电视访谈的陈述。

Zynga及其竞争者存在的有趣地方是其作品几乎没有任何差异性。此局面是随时间逐步发展而来的，这些公司最初都有自己独特的游戏作品，但随后逐步融合，如今都互相效仿。不论扑克、宠物、鱼缸、农场，还是黑手党模拟作品，每种游戏类型几乎都千篇一律地相互模仿。

其中存在某些细微差别，但并不显著。鲜有病毒式传播游戏开发商拥有自己的新一代游戏设计理念。马克·平卡斯的上述讲话表明，Zynga游戏定有其他同类游戏所没有的差异之处。

其次，所有主流开发商都有“社交栏”，此术语指的是呈现于游戏上方或侧边的系列链接，用于交叉推广游戏。所有主流开发商都有植入此机制，通常是在游戏页面顶部或左侧（游戏邦注：如Playfish）。

这说明病毒式传播内容开发商之间的唯一区别是：

* 是否采用广告策略

* 是否愿意借助Facebook病毒式传播功能

* 是否能够在游戏中进行交叉推广

* 是否具有高质量内部参数

所以Zynga成功秘诀及其他开发商遵循的模式是：

1. 在平台广告中投入大量资金，以获得用户

2. 尽可能利用Facebook病毒式传播功能。Zynga游戏在此方面表现突出。他们比其他开发商更推崇通知、邀请、提醒和请求功能。

3. 基于关注度而非挑战性奖励玩家。除《Poker》外，所有Zynga游戏都不具挑战性，它们采用的是创建-等待模拟模式。

4. 以进化论方式使用参数，旨在快速获悉适合、不适合内容。和很多开发商不同，Zynga积极根据市场反应情况快速移除或调整应用。

Zynga拥有的玩家比竞争对手多非常多，因为他们投入更多资金，在获得玩家关注后，他们继续保持提醒和奖励玩家促使他们持续回访，最后移除那些无法有效运作的渠道。

这并不是什么巧妙策略，但非常适合Facebook平台生态。Playdom和Playfish无法迎头赶上的唯一原因是其未投入足够广告预算，不愿充分利用病毒式传播功能。Zynga只是在此更具竞争力，其诉诸广告垃圾邮件策略最大限度吸引用户注意。

但Zynga模式只有在下述情况下才能够继续维持：

1. Facebook未大刀阔斧变革平台

2. 玩家数量持续增加

3. 广告方案保持有效

4. 游戏质量得以保持

5. 行业趋势依旧能够轻松复制

失去支撑平台后，Zynga及那些采用相同模式的竞争对手将陷入困境。这是未来定会出现的情况。

调整：进入选择Vs.退出选择

创建成功病毒式传播渠道有两个非常重要的内容：能够传播和留存。有传播无留存是测验应用和休闲游戏常走的路。他们通常能够快速窜升至榜单前列，随后又迅速没落。而有留存但无传播的应用通常是诸如《Battle Stations》、《Vikings of Thule》或《Tennis Mania》之类的精品游戏（游戏邦注：这些游戏拥有少量忠诚粉丝，但无法成为轰动巨作）。

传播应用通常需要创新和跟进潮流。如今制作农场游戏已意义不大，因为多数人早已厌倦农场内容，新作将很难获得传播。Playfish《乡村物语》的用户规模只有《FarmVille》的10%（此对比是参照2009年12月18日的数据标准），而且目前还处在下滑中，其《Poker Rivals》在用户粘性方面的表现也相当糟糕（Zynga的DAU/MAU比值达24%，而Playfish只有9%，此数据亦是2009年12月18日标准）。两款游戏都未能及时顺应潮流，我预计其黑手党内容也无法取得成功。

传播应用也需有交叉性。Zynga凭借《咖啡世界》、《Fish Ville》和《Pet Ville》充分展示其迅速创建数百万用户基础的超强实力。如何实现？他们在其他作品中进行交叉推广，购买大量广告传播游戏内容。若你有足够资金，这在当前环境下是非常有效的策略。

留存是创收的主要渠道，同时也是保持发展的主要原因。获得高留存率的主要方法有：

1. 玩家通知，这混合在玩家同好友的Facebook讨论内容、图片和其他内容中。所以玩家无法完全忽略它们。玩家可以封锁来自特定应用的通知，但很多Facebook玩家并不知道如何操作。

2. 玩家请求。玩家可向其他玩家发送某独立应用请求。目前尚不清楚此行为是否完全受玩家控制。同样请求也是混杂于其他请求内之中（就像邀请和好友请求）。若玩家懂得操作，这些信息也能够屏蔽。

3. 交叉发布。很多休闲游戏鼓励玩家在Facebook个人主页晒高分（这在短期内非常有效），其他内容玩家则发布更多圆满游戏故事。Facebook倾向奖励选择发布消息的默认行为，因为平台含有弹出对话框和两个按键，一个彩色（发布），一个灰色（跳过）。

4. 标记。玩家可以标记自己喜欢的应用，这样他就能从标记栏中快速访问自己喜欢的应用。

5. 粉丝更新内容。玩家能够选择“成为某应用粉丝”。这促使应用能够在玩家收件箱的Updates版块发送消息，同时使得他们能够像Facebook Pages那样享有交叉发布应用内容权利。

6. 发送消息。这是最近添加的内容，让玩家能够在其他应用中直接互发消息，信息直接出现在玩家的收件箱中，而不是通过请求形式。

7. 邀请。邀请好友体验游戏。邀请是迄今为止最古老，最受限的游戏机制之一，此功能在Facebook刚问世时，受到众多早期开发商的滥用。很多游戏规定玩家需有一定数量“邻居”，才能够在游戏中继续前进。这相当于要求玩家邀请好友参与体验。这也促使陌生人互相加为好友，只为获得有利游戏条件。

8. 发送电子邮件。这也是不久刚添加的内容，开发商能够索要玩家的邮箱地址以便同其进一步联系。

这些机制大多是基于能够选择退出模式。在多数情况下，玩家会选择屏蔽信息或者默默忍受，而不是积极处理。这让开发商觉得机制运作顺利，但过度将加入选择机制用于提醒玩家，会给玩家留下糟糕体验，令玩家觉得自己是垃圾邮件受害者。这同时也会给Facebook带来不良影响。

Facebook解决办法是把大多数退出选择换做加入选择。玩家享有更多决定应用是否能够联系他们的权利，这意味着应用无法靠发送垃圾邮件获得成功。这一调整连同另一Facebook主页设计更新意义重大。回到上述列表，以下是调整内容：

1. 第三方应用无法使用通知功能。平台融入新机制“Counters”，其允许应用提醒玩家回访，但存在两个限制因素：发布信息比之前更具限制性，玩家需标记应用，应用才能发送向玩家发送信息。这个调整非常重要，因为通知对Zynga之类的开发商来说基本是个免费营销工具。要向玩家发送消息意味着应用需要着力获得玩家的标记。这就是为什么病毒式传播当前在鼓励玩家标记方面作用显著。

2. 目前尚不清楚请求功能是否也受到相同管理。当期似乎没有，但某些开发商显然会滥用这些功能（游戏邦注：就像对待通知功能一样），迫使Facebook也采取行动。

3. 交叉发布仍旧存在但需注意：在玩家点击发布对话框前，应用需给予明确发布选择。这能够排除大量多余发布。

4. 标记功能有待进一步提高。他们有望变得更突出，获得更多使用。

5. 成为粉丝功能也没有改变。有了标记功能后，所有应用都鼓励玩家成为粉丝。推广这一功能促使应用MAU得到10%提高。多数应用并未使用Fan Page的Updates功能，所以玩家是否会摒弃此类应用，或者选择接受这种交流方式，我们有待进一步观察。

6. 发送消息是旨在帮助无法使用通知功能开发商的新功能。消息需清楚明了，但存在1对1限制，因此并不是群发垃圾邮件工具。

7. 邀请功能继续存在，但更具限制性。应用无法再将其当作用户默认输入界面。玩家自主选择，不受诱导。此处禁止设置关卡。

8. 和发送消息一样，邮件也是旨在弥补开发商无法使用通知功能的缺憾。我个人认为把邮件当作广告渠道的开发商很快会发现，邮件在此种对话中毫无用处。

此外，Facebook承诺设定统一规则，旨在防止开发商违反规则，同时其将取缔此行为，直至参与者重新遵守规则。

目前Zynga面临的实际问题是他们无法像过去那样轻松推动玩家回访游戏。这是个大问题，因为Zynga及其竞争对手推出的内容不够优秀，无法促使玩家自然回访，自愿体验。

病毒式传播游戏目前主要关注推广，而非内容，这就是为什么开发商不会投入大把时间推敲游戏深度。大型多人游戏或第一人称射击游戏玩家无需靠刺激回复游戏，游戏内容非常精彩，他们自觉回访。没有Facebook游戏能够达到此种程度。他们更多是闲暇时候的消遣内容。

此性质的游戏通常无法有效吸引玩家，能够自主选择来产品或服务发送信息通常促使玩家在决定联系对象时比在选择退出时更加挑剔。

群体：持续发展的结束和老玩家的兴起

Facebook继续独占鳌头，平均每日增加50万用户，其中很多都是游戏玩家。马克·平卡斯将之称作基于新共同体验精神，新好友、联系探索理念，内容分享渠道和社交联系创建方式的社交变革。所有这些都是值得赞赏的理念，但多数都属于空想。总体来看，玩家不会以社交方式体验《黑手党战争》，也不会以家庭棋盘游戏模式体验《餐厅城市》。病毒式传播游戏的成功更容易解释：

其是新颖题材。

Facebook首次面向普通大众引入网页游戏。这也是为什么到目前为止扑克、虚拟宠物模拟内容、农场游戏和简单角色扮演游戏之类的普通游戏能够在平台蔓延。就游戏环境来看，它们同简单游戏《Wii Sports》刚发行时一样新颖。在任何新游戏环境中，简单游戏通常都能够处于支配地位，因为玩家投入游戏完全受其新鲜感推动。

问题是兴奋感消失后，内容无法永远保持新鲜。新手玩家开始产生期望，开始变成老手。这种效应也同样出现在硬核玩家、扑克游戏玩家、休闲游戏的主妇玩家或者其他任何除小孩之外的游戏玩家身上。

病毒式传播游戏开发商的运作方式让人觉得游戏会有源源不断的新玩家，但其实并非如此。更准确来说，这归咎于群体更新，但稳定市场的新老玩家更换率通常比Facebook市场低得多，这是因为Facebook发展迅猛。

Games Workshop、任天堂、美泰和孩之宝都已找到管理稳定更新玩家群体的方式。他们通过挖掘或制作杰出持久作品，鼓励老玩家带动新玩家，树立世代相传的名声，进而获得稳定粉丝群体。

Zynga游戏并非靠更新理念支撑。它们是旨在吸引新玩家的内容，他们通常假设目标群体都是新玩家。所以其内容通俗易懂、要求不高、不含挑战或后果，主要基于定时任务。他们自己或许并未意识到，但Zynga、Playdom和Playfish正悄悄促使数百万新手寄予更多期望，而他们自己又浑然不知。

Facebook的增长率开始逐步放缓。所有受简单应用吸引的新玩家数量也将开始减少，而老玩家将会增加（游戏邦注：老手玩家要求更高，更有经验，更挑剔）。

老手玩家呈多元化态势。他们不再随波逐流，而是开始瞄准那些适合自己的游戏内容。这对内容毫无差异的市场来说是致命打击，例如病毒式传播游戏。依靠广泛群体的开发商会逐步发现其无法同合成软件匹敌。老手玩家会觉得自己已玩过这类游戏，他们希望体验更多内容。

老手玩家同时也是挑剔群体：当他们开始接触Youtube，他们会分享所有看到的视频内容。如今Youtube用户及其同伴已对每天充斥于Youtube的抓拍镜头剪辑习以为常，所以他们希望看到更多有价值的内容。新用户觉得有趣的内容对老用户来说无聊透顶。因此新用户更容易同好友分享游戏内容，而老用户只会选择性进行。

老玩家将分享视作表达和显示身份的渠道。你分享的内容会展示你的身份，所以分享存在的风险是损害声誉。鲜有老玩家希望自己被冠以垃圾邮件发布者的称号。所以他们不会向所有好友分享每个看到的Youtube剪辑。相反他们会有选择地向可能感兴趣群体或个人分享内容。玩家只消花费片刻时间便能完成过滤工作。

广告：饱和问题

Zynga获得如此庞大用户群体部分是通过平台广告。据报道，其斥资5000万美元进行此项目。在多数情况下，在线广告很难有所成效，Facebook环境亦是如此。Zynga通过投入巨额资金解决此问题：即便最无效的广告也能至少收获些许用户粘性，也许只有1%。

在线广告倾向吸引无法轻易判别平台和广告区别的新玩家，通常更值得信赖。老玩家通常会不知不觉过滤广告，除非他们是特定目标群体，内容同他们相关。结果，娱乐内容通常很难纯粹依靠广告售出，除非你计划大规模使用大型广告（就像好莱坞电影公司）。

产品通常基于解决问题吸引玩家。这通常指功能问题或生活方式问题，从流行袜子到飞纽约的便宜机票。这说明它们能够基于同类数据瞄准和创建相关群体。谷歌通过推出产品、博客文本匹配广告大发横财，Facebook自己的广告也擅长基于地点、兴趣之类个人信息推出微观定位广告。所以成功在线产品和服务的诀窍是发现大家需要解决的问题，然后帮助他们解决，接着告知他们。

游戏（以及电影、书籍和音乐）不会解决问题。回顾过去，游戏或许能够在玩家未察觉的情况下帮助他们解决问题，但玩家不会抱着解决问题的心态寻找乐趣。关注某些主题能够帮助你成功瞄准广告内容，但就多数游戏来说，这无法带来任何有意义成果。同类数据通常会变成令人乏味的内容。要让用户获得娱乐享受需给他们带来惊喜。

娱乐活动能够带给我们全新感受，否则我们很快就会丧失兴趣。这说明有趣而新鲜的故事内容必不可少，大量媒体曝光也十分重要，你的广告或消息需基于大众兴趣瞄准用户（游戏邦注：这靠充足预算支撑）。这同时也意味着日益老练的玩家不会关注这些内容。所以Zynga必须投入更多资金获取用户，这将出现持续饱和、丧失兴趣和广告粘性降低的循环周期。这就是为什么Zynga最近要融资1.8亿美元。他们需像从未开展过营销活动那样投入大笔营销资金。

但这个策略最终也将失败，因为所有游戏依旧非常肤浅。Zynga或许会诉诸更加有趣的营销内容，但老玩家最终将发现这些更像是骗局，他们只会为获得奖励而进行互动，或若他们觉得这些奖励毫无价值，就会完全跳过。

解决此饱和问题的唯一办法在于开发规模更小、更具吸引力的内容，放慢脚步，建立真正粉丝基础，开发自我营销的软件。这同开发商们普遍采用的顺应趋势，广告分享，低质量策略完全不同。

此策略无需大量营销投入，早前已在在线游戏领域顺利运作（例如EVE Online、Runescape和Puzzle Pirates），但在基于创新而非复制的领域，这是个全新方式。但我认为当前鲜有大型开发商具备足够耐心。

同质内容：刻板思维问题

Facebook和Zynga热潮让我回想起雅达利时代：

雅达利在投资《乒乓球》时就意识到他们所进行的活动非常有前景。他们迅速创建深受大众喜爱平台，给其他开发商提供机会。平台最初涌现系列优秀而有趣的游戏，但随着雅达利平台的成熟，软件质量低劣成为一大问题。

曾经因能够在客厅玩《乒乓球》而兴奋不已的新玩家逐步变成老练玩家，他们早已厌倦众多《乒乓球》克隆品。早期的游戏领域热衷快速致富，且未着手处理此问题，而是全心顺应趋势推出大量作品，以从中获利。行业开始达成各种合作协议，游戏成为电影业的第二营收来源，发行商和平台所有者开始着眼获利，而不是创造价值。

充斥劣质作品的过度饱和市场开始分崩离析，因为所有参与 公司都将游戏视作数字快餐。在游戏平台发展过程中，某些公司开始面向低标准玩家开发作品，且在一定时间内获得相应回报。

他们认为内容是种“辅助酱料”，推广才是关键所在。所以整个游戏行业的重心都放在创造和复制数字巨无霸、鸡肉卷和Fillets o Fish上，抢占先机投放市场。竞争者通常喜欢让他人承担繁重创新任务，然后自己再创造更符合趋势的版本，接着通过推广和营销突破重围。

快餐内容包含如下元素：

* 广泛吸引力

* 核心游戏编码

* 营收机制

* 回访渠道

在病毒式传播游戏中这些相当于：

1. 构思简单游戏内容。经营农场，饲养鱼群，玩扑克牌。

2. 角色扮演编码。所有成功病毒式传播游戏都包含角色扮演关卡和经验值，这给予玩家前进目标。

3. 营收机制是虚拟货币。

4. 回访渠道是提醒、通知。

将此铭记于心，你也就把握住方向。这里只有个小问题：游戏不是快餐食品。

用户不会厌烦汉堡包，因为他们具有吃东西的生物本能（假设他们没有过度食用），他们总是喜欢类似汉堡包的味道。
用户偏好某家店的汉堡包，喜欢变更牌子，但总坚持食用最熟悉的品牌，连锁店的覆盖范围因此至关重要。

但玩家确实厌倦《乒乓球》。虽然他们的确为这款游戏着迷过一段时间，但99%的玩家最终都感到厌烦。他们不会从某《乒乓球》复制品转移至其他类似内容。相反，他们最初会寻找更多《乒乓球》内容，满足自己的期望，但当《乒乓球》再无新鲜内容，他们就会停止玩这一类型的内容。

玩家厌倦感不易应对。短期来说，我们可以对成功游戏或题材稍作调整，融入比赛推动玩家回访，或其他类似举措。但老练玩家最终会识破这一措施。持续开发和扩充似乎更行得通，这是在线游戏优于零售内容的地方，但其存在局限之处，若游戏核心内容过于单薄。

同时玩家也不是非玩游戏不可。雅达利太晚意识到这点：玩家开始不再入驻其平台。他们厌烦不断体验那些包装不同，内容相似的作品。和雅达利一样，Zynga存在的风险是公司错误认为推出同质作品就足够，觉得用户总存在体验欲望，其实不然。

目前新玩家体验Facebook所有游戏内容，因为他们是游戏新手。病毒式传播游戏内容目前质量不高，但他们此时毫不在意。所以为迎合需求，主流开发商推出5-6款包装不同的同类游戏，他们疯狂推广作品，就像快餐连锁店对待牛肉、鸡肉和鱼肉三明治一样。

当开发商认为其当前任务是抢占先机推出新游戏版本，质量不足为道时，他们就面临危机。病毒式传播游戏开发商似乎认为这是推广和创收的唯一途径，因为玩家总希望体验游戏。

经济学家将这种思维称作“非理性繁荣”。

我们不能确保玩家会改变行为，体验不同类型的内容。众多Zynga策略似乎都围绕将玩家从某作品转移至另一作品，此策略本身就是个反复过程。通过告诉自己游戏业务是个推广决胜负的行业，开发商就会忽略创造内容价值。他们认为同伙伴保持同等质量就已足够，因为玩家不会流向其他地方。

他们显然大错特错。没有什么能够阻止投向他处寻找乐趣，因为Facebook用户并非处于被动状态。

逆反潮流：当有人制作难以复制的优质内容

另一风险是出现无法复制的游戏作品。快餐模式之所以如此风靡部分是因为开发商认为同质作品能够继续存在，新作品能够轻易被复制。在雅达利时代，这确属实情因为平台存在物理局限（游戏邦注：不论是内部硅片，还是外部一键操纵杆）。而Facebook平台则不那么局限。

角色扮演游戏属于最易被复制的游戏类型之一。角色扮演游戏的核心机制非常简单：玩家设定系列游戏目标，然后采取若干行动实现这些目标，剩下的就是时间问题。

《魔兽世界》玩家把这些称作“瞎忙活”。在《魔兽世界》和《EVE Online》之类的游戏中，琐碎任务的目的是：通过创建某角色或购买某太空飞船，攻克探索或太空战斗之类的艰难挑战。而在《FarmVille》中，琐碎任务完全就是琐碎任务。你日以继夜地在农场劳作，积累金钱给农场添置物品，这让你能够以不同方式执行琐碎任务，赚更多的钱，买更多的东西。

《魔兽世界》琐碎任务和《FarmVille》琐碎任务的最大区别在于游戏平衡需求。《魔兽世界》的游戏平衡是极其复杂的编程、测试和设计技能，即使7年之后，暴雪公司还会不断修正、再修正所有主要作品。而《FarmVille》则毫无游戏平衡可言。游戏所需调整的不过是玩家有所抱怨的数量或时长设定。这完全取决于玩家希望多久能够收获虚拟稻谷，以便换购拖拉机。

纯琐碎任务的角色扮演游戏还包含一个必要游戏机制：获得更多道具解锁更多内容，获得这些道具便能解锁新内容。其他内容均属定制。定制非常重要，这促使玩家能够表达创造性思维，例如创建自己的独特农场，但一旦新鲜感消失，定制模式在激励方面就难起作用。举个例子，很多《餐厅城市》玩家最初投入大量时间布置理想中的餐厅，但他们后来发现这毫无效用。所以，最后所有玩家都转而制作寿司条，因为这是最有效的布置举措。

未含游戏平衡的单一机制游戏很容易被借鉴和复制。Zynga制作继《Farm Town》之后的《FarmVille》才用不到3个月时间；而在CrowdStar《Happy Aquarium》之后的《FishVille》则耗时更短；《黑手党战争》同样没有超过3个月。这些游戏后来都公开推出新内容，但正是由于Zynga投入如此短的时间制作内容，其才能够充分借助营销工具，把握发展趋势。

即便是不在此范围内的扑克游戏也符合这个规则。Facebook扑克游戏和其他角色扮演游戏的实际区别是它们融入更复杂的解决方案机制（游戏邦注：即扑克玩法）。其目标仍旧保持一致，例如获得关卡和虚拟道具，用于执行方案的机制是扑克。扑克内容非常普遍，容易复制。

所以Zynga在开发方面面临的一个大问题是现有开发商推出无法轻易被解码和复制的内容。例如：

1. 即时或回合制策略游戏。制作优秀电脑塔防游戏需付出很大努力，同样制作杰出回合制策略游戏也非一蹴而就。Zynga过去制作的策略游戏因缺乏趣味表现糟糕，开发商很难轻易成功制作这类作品。

2. 物理游戏。很多Flash休闲开发商都擅长制作动作和物理游戏，有些开始进军Facebook。物理游戏之所以不易复制是因为开发商需投入大把时间，进行大量测试，方能找准“感觉”。

3. 内容丰富游戏。融入故事、谜题、探险元素和制作价值的游戏不易制作。

4. 深刻模拟游戏。《FarmVille》和《模拟人生》的区别很大，这是因为《FarmVille》缺乏深度奖励，机制不够突出，而《模拟人生》则有更详细、更突出的结构，能够留住玩家数年。

在上述4个例子中，他们的主要差别在于投放市场时间。《FarmVille》仅耗时12-16个星期便问世，但制作首版大型策略游戏需花费28-36个星期，才能确保尽善尽美。到那个时候内容就赶不上趋势，就像Playfish滞后入驻扑克和农场领域。

因此病毒式传播游戏面临一个大问题：它们缺乏奖励耗时制作内容的内部文化，因此任何投入大把精力的开发商将能够吸引老练玩家眼球，而在此方面病毒式传播开发商无法匹敌。病毒式传播开发商是十足的潮流追随者，但却不是潮流引导者。

举例：

* 《Vikings of Thule》旨在成为一款融入复杂战斗的角色扮演游戏，需玩家积极参与。目前看来，游戏仍旧是款小型游戏，仅瞄准特定群体，无法吸引大众眼球，但其内容趣味横生。

* 著名策略游戏《文明》早前入驻Facebook，成为颇具知名度的交叉平台游戏。《文明》机制十分复杂，但同时又通俗易懂。其有望令某些玩家对Facebook游戏刮目相看。

短期/长期目标

Zynga存在的根本问题是它把所有时间都用于获取用户，却没有腾出时间把用户变成忠诚粉丝。他们着眼当前，对待玩家的态度和曾经的电玩公司如出一辙，快速创收，然后继续瞄准新内容。因此他们忽略了对网络公司来说非常重要的一点：

建立粉丝群体。

制作娱乐内容就像约会。你需努力把自己变得颇具魅力。性感关乎创造性、可信度、人格魅力和性格。性感人物总是处在突出位置。性感之人具有使命感，身份意识，通常凸显个人，充满好奇，乐于响应，会同你暗送秋波。他们不会欺骗你，不会让你觉得被利用。相反，他们拥有众多追随者。聪明性感人物会让你萌生恋爱感觉，他们不断完善自我，仍然拥有众多原始仰慕者。

病毒式传播游戏公司并不性感。其品牌无人仰慕，其核心价值完全基于短期商业机会。唯一觉得病毒式传播游戏性感的是投资群体和初创新闻网站（游戏邦注：如Mashable），它们多出于创收和价值炒作。

游戏要性感，就要促使自己处在主流体验尖端，挖掘能够吸引用户眼球的内容。长久以来，Games Workshop就是通过坚持黑暗风格和创造引人注目游戏世界突出自己在棋盘和战争游戏领域的地位，其用户群体忠诚度颇高，每年在雕像上挥洒众多金钱。暴雪则通过在开发中坚持“尽善尽美”原则和在各个游戏中创建独特角色，树立自己的视频游戏中的优势地位。暴雪成绩显著，单《魔兽世界》就几乎分割大部分PC零售游戏收益。

Zynga毫无性感魅力。他们制作普通名称的普通游戏（餐厅/咖啡厅/酒馆/医院/农场/怪兽+城镇/城市/村庄/乡村/故事/战争），毫无壮志雄心。他们的游戏既未令人印象深刻，也未能激发兴趣。对于多数玩家来说，他们不过是消磨时间的活动。

因此他们面临的挑战是吸取所学经验，应用于未来发展。若Facebook大幅调整平台，将退出选择交还给玩家，那么Zynga就无法通过诉诸新型诱导和邮件发送渠道，促使玩家回访《FarmVille》，维持自身发展。他们需将1.8亿美元用于建立真正粉丝基础。

他们可以建立Facebook之外的门户网站或者创建富有竞争力的社交网络，作为自己的开发平台。或者他们也可以选择投资更大型、更优秀的作品或更复杂、更完整的虚拟世界。他们可以携手更小型、更独立、更具创造性的开发商，形成合作伙伴网络。此策略能够带来更优秀、更多元化的内容。

但从现实来看，我认为他们丝毫没有此方面计划。我觉得他们真正的计划是斥资1.8亿美元用于推广游戏内容。或许Zynga能够充分借助Facebook，将其作为玩家活动提醒。这或许才是适合Zynga之类求胜心切，关注当下公司的发展模式。

Zynga资金雄厚，Playdom和Playfish亦是如此，但其模式存在深层弱点，将构成威胁。用户期望将会发生改变，商业模式的关键要素亦是如此，虽然其目前仍旧取得短期成就，但病毒式传播游戏未来将无法轻松成功。

现在来谈谈困难部分。多元化、试验和深层设计说明有趣构思无法轻松获得，公司需投身其中，充分了解。目前这不是Zynga所遵循的路线。

未来各个公司将开始寻求差异化，建立强大粉丝基础，创造真正富有价值的内容，成为市场新宠儿。未适时进行调整的公司将继续存在，但他们的作品会面临困境。随着社交游戏结束其初期发展阶段，Zynga会逐步成为雅达利时代的发行商，其获利丰厚，但无法获得长久发展，因为他们过多把游戏看作汉堡生意。

游戏邦注：原文发布于2009年12月28日，文章涉及数据、事件以当时为准。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Zynga and the End of the Beginning

by Tadhg Kelly

Where two years ago everyone was talking about ‘casual’ games, now they’re all talking about ‘social’ games. Key developers have recently attracted some very big numbers. This article is not really about Zynga itself, but rather examining what underpins their business model, the likely threats to which it must adapt and how Zynga – as standard bearer of the social game community – will likely fare in the coming year.  As Zynga goes, so the rest of the social game market tends to follow.

The first thing to say is that the people running Zynga are both very smart and competitive. They have streaked ahead of all of their competition by applying a relatively simple strategy of picking up on gaming trends, copying them quickly and then maximising every avenue of Facebook to spread their message thoroughly. Zynga currently has 4 times as many monthly active players in their games as their next closest rival. To look at the distribution of players on an Appdata.com chart, you would be forgiven for thinking that there was an error in the metric reportage, such is the disparity.

It’s also important to understand something about ‘social games’: Most of them are not social. They tend to be single or multi-player games that use social networks (mostly Facebook) as an easy way to drive player adoption. What the industry is calling ‘social games’ are more accurately described as ‘viral games’.

The focus of most viral game developers is maximising trends. Trends rise and fall quickly in response to player boredom, retention is king, and developers spend much of their time reminding players to play, to invite their friends, to post stories from the game to their profiles, and other activity designed essentially to not let the player forget to come and play. Viral gaming relies a lot on ways to grab or nudge players’ attention. Like any third party game publisher they are reliant on the benevolence of their platform holders (primarily Facebook) and the market conditions that their platform has engendered.

This has resulted in predominantly short-term thinking. Viral game development is a battleground of very simple and usually cloned games, interruption marketing tactics, push-to-the-limit tactics to jog players into returning to play, and a lot of scrambling to be on the next trends as fast as possible. Viral game developers, such as Zynga, have little or no commitment to developing deep or rich game experiences because the market has not really rewarded that kind of activity. However that lack of depth is precisely the reason why viral gaming is showing signs of weakness typical in any runaway success.

Zynga this week received investment of $180m from DST, a Russian venture capital firm (which also owns a small share of Facebook itself), and this signals the end of something and the beginning of something else. The big question is this: Is it the beginning of the end? Or is it the end of the beginning?

Product Differentiation (or Lack Thereof)

“Let me point out to you guys: There’s got to be some reason why FarmVille has grown to 28 million daily active players and the next one, Farm Town, has five million and is not growing, right? If all that we were doing is everyone was copying each other then why is it that some are growing and some aren’t?”

Mark Pincus in a recent television interview on MSNBC’s “Press:Here”

What’s interesting about Zynga and their competitors is that there is almost no differentiation between their games. This has happened gradually over time, with companies originally starting out with their own unique rosters of games and slowly amalgamating their catalogues to the point that they are carbon copies of each other. Whether poker, pets, fish tanks, farms, or mafia simulators, each game type is replicated almost identically.

There are some subtle variations, but they don’t really amount to anything of significance. There are no viral game developers that have next-generation or revolutionary game designs that they alone wield. Mark Pincus’s quote above suggests that Zynga’s games must have an inherent difference that other similar games do not but they really don’t.

Secondly, all of the main developers have a “social bar”, which is the technical term for a set of links displayed above or beside each game to cross-promote players into other games. All the major developers have such a system in place, usually at top of each game page or (in Playfish’s case) to the left.

So that means the only real differences between the viral developers are:

* Advertising strategy

* Their willingness to exploit Facebook’s virality features

* Ability to cross-promote within games.

* Quality of internal metrics

So the secret to Zynga’s success, and the model that all the other developers practise to a lesser degree, is as simple as this:

1. Spend heavily on on-platform advertising to acquire players.

2. Exploit Facebook’s virality features as much as possible. Zynga’s games are very aggressive in this regard. They push notifications, invites, reminders and requests more than any other game developers.

3. Reward players based on attention rather than challenge. With the possible exception of Poker, all Zynga’s games aren’t at all challenging but rather are a build-and-wait simulation model.

4. Use metrics in as Darwinian a fashion as possible to root out what works and what doesn’t as fast as possible. Zynga, unlike many developers, actively kills applications or change them quickly depending on what the market is telling them.

Zynga has way more players than their competitors because they spend more to get them, and when they have them they constantly remind and reward returning behaviour, and lastly kill any channels that just aren’t working.

It’s a very un-subtle strategy but entirely appropriate for the landscape and the platform that Facebook created, and the only reason that Playdom and Playfish have not kept pace is smaller or no advertising spend and an unwillingness to exploit virality to its fullest. Zynga are simply more competitive and they use what amounts to a very successful ad-spam strategy to buy player attention in any way that they can.

But Zynga’s model can only continue to work under these conditions:

1. If Facebook doesn’t significantly change the platform

2. If player growth remains constant

3. If advertising remains effective

4. If game quality remains equivalent

5. If trends remain easily copied

Kick enough of those legs out from under the Zynga table and they – and their competitors who have the same mindset that they do – could well be in for some tough times. It just so happens that this is exactly what’s about to happen.

Changes: Opting In vs. Opting Out

There are two important parts to building any successful viral application: It has to spread and it has to be retained. Spreading without retention is the typical path of quiz applications and strictly casual games. They tend to fly up the charts and subsequently decline just as quickly. On the other hand, applications that don’t spread but retain well tend to be boutique games like Battle Stations, Vikings of Thule or Tennis Mania which have small and loyal audiences but are unlikely to ever be blockbusters.

Getting an application to spread requires novelty and is fashion-driven. There’s no point making a farm game these days because everyone is sick of farm games and a new entrant will find it hard to spread. Playfish’s Country Story only has 10% of the audience size of FarmVille and is in decline, and their Poker Rivals game is performing very poorly in the engagement stakes (9% DAU to MAU compared to Zynga’s steady 24%). Both simply came way too late to the party, and I suspect their forthcoming Mafia game will not go far either.

Getting an application to spread also requires interruption. Zynga have demonstrated with Café World, Fish Ville and now Pet Ville an uncanny ability to build millions of players in only a few days. How? They cross-promote from other games and buy large blocks of advertising to spread the word. This works best in the current environment if you have the money to do it.

Retention is then the prime opportunity to monetise, but also a major source of sustained growth. The prime techniques for achieving high retention are:

1. Notifications to players, which appear mixed in with notifications about discussions they are having with friends on Facebook, tagged photos and other items. So players cannot fully ignore them. Notifications from specific applications can be blocked but many Facebook players don’t really know how to do that.

2. Requests from players. Players can send requests from inside applications to one another. It is unclear whether this behaviour is entirely player-controlled. Requests also appear all within a mix of other kinds of requests (like event invites and friend requests). They too can be blocked if a player knows how.

3. Stream publishing. Some casual games push high scores to Facebook profiles (this is actually quite effective for short periods of time) and others publish more rounded game stories. The Facebook implementation tends to reward a default behaviour of choosing to publish because it involves a pop-up dialog and two buttons, one coloured (publish) and the other grey (skip).

4. Bookmarks. Players can bookmark a favoured application so that it becomes easy to access from the Bookmarks bar.

5. Fan updates. Applications can be ‘fanned’ by players. Becoming a fan of an application gives that application the ability to send messages to the Updates part of a player’s Inbox, and also subscribes them to the applications stream publishes, just like Facebook Pages.

6. Messaging. A recent addition is allowing players to directly message each other from inside other applications and have that go into the player’s Inbox rather than as Requests.

7. Invites. Inviting your friends to play a game. Invites are among the oldest and most controlled mechanism to date because many early developers abused them when the Facebook Platform first launched. Some games use mechanics in which players must have a certain number of ‘neighbours’ in order to progress in the game. This is tantamount to making players invite their friends to play. It also causes strangers to add each other as friends just to gain game advantage.

8. E-mail. Also a recent addition, developers can request players’ e-mail addresses as a way to further contact them.

Most of these systems are based around an opt-out structure. A player can choose to block them but in the majority of cases the players are more likely to simply ignore or put up with them rather than actively deal with them. That may lead developers to think that that is fine, but when opt-in systems are over-used to remind players, they leave a sense of poor experience and a feeling of being the victim of spam. And that reflects badly on Facebook itself.

Facebook’s solution is to replace most of these opt-out systems with opt-in equivalents. They are allowing players to have much more control over whether applications gain permission to contact them at all, which means that applications cannot spam their way to success. This change, combined with another update of the Facebook home page design, is really very significant. Going back to the list above, here’s what’s changing:

1. Third party applications are no longer getting access to notifications. Instead a new system called ‘Counters’ will allow applications to remind players to come back and play, but with two restrictions: The material that may be posted is more restricted than before, and players must bookmark an application before it can send them counters. This change is extremely important because notifications were essentially a free advertising channel for developers like Zynga. Tying counters to bookmarks means that applications will have to work hard to be bookmarked. This is why most viral games are very prominently encouraging players to bookmark at the moment.

2. It is unclear at this time if requests will be similarly policed. At the moment it seems not, but it is likely that some developers will over-use them – as they did with notifications – and force Facebook to take action.

3. Stream publishing remains but with one big caveat: Applications must contain explicit options for players to publish before they hit the publishing dialog. This is will kill an awful lot of needless publishing from players.

4. Bookmarks will be improved. It looks like they will become more visible and more will be allowed.

5. Fanning is unchanged. As with Bookmarks, every app is encouraging players to become fans. The up-take on this seems to be around 10% of the monthly active players. Most applications do not yet use the Updates feature of Fan Pages, so it remains to be seen whether players start de-fanning applications that do, or whether they embrace that kind of communication.

6. Messaging is an addition to help developers because of the departure of notifications. Messages have to be explicit and have restrictions of only one-player-to-one-player however, so they won’t be mass-spam devices.

7. Invites remain but are even more constrained. Applications are no longer permitted to use them as the default entry screen for players. Players must choose to invite rather than be cajoled into doing so. Gating is being banned.

8. E-mail, like messaging, is being offered as a salve to developers concerned by the loss of notifications. I personally suspect that developers who use e-mail like their own personal spam-advertising mailing list are going to quickly discover that e-mail is totally ineffective for that kind of conversation.

Additionally, Facebook have promised to step up their compliance policing significantly to make sure that developers are not breaking the rules, and banning applications that do either until they are made compliant or permanently.

So for Zynga the real issue here is that they cannot really nudge players to return to applications nearly as easily as they used to. This is a big problem because they, and their competitors, are not sitting on catalogues of games which are good enough that they naturally encourage players to return and play them of their own accord.

Viral gaming up until this point has largely been a game of distribution plays rather than content plays, which is why the developers don’t really spend a lot of time on the depth of their games. In online gaming such as massive multiplayer games or first-person shooters players do not need nudging to come back and play again and again because the experience of playing is so good that they choose to return. No Facebook game comes anywhere close to offering that. They are closer to idle distractions.

Games of that nature simply do not register significantly with players and opting-in to receive information from any kind of product or service tends to make players much choosier about who can contact them than opting-out does.

Population: The End of Endless Growth and the Rise of Veterans

Facebook continues to blow away the competition in country after country, adding 0.5m players a day across the world, many of them game players. Mark Pincus has called this a social revolution based on a new spirit of playing together, of finding new friends and new connections, making new shared memories, building social connections and so on. All of these are laudable statements, but most of them are fantasy. Players don’t, on the whole, play Mafia Wars in a social fashion, nor do they play Restaurant City in the mould of family board games. Viral gaming’s success is much easier to explain:

It’s new.

What Facebook enables is the introduction of web gaming to normal people for the first time. This is why relatively ordinary game concepts like poker, virtual pet simulators, farming games and simple role-playing games have managed to penetrate so far. Taken in context, they’re all as brand new as the equally simple Wii Sports was when Wii first launched. In any completely new game environment, unsophisticated games tend to rule the roost because players spend time being delighted by the strangeness of it all.

The problem is that delight fades, and nothing stays new forever. Novice players start to develop expectations, and become veterans. This effect applies equally to hardcore gamers, poker players, casual gaming housewives or any segment of game players except young children.

Viral game developers behave as though there is an endless supply of novices, but of course there isn’t. More accurately, there is due to population renewal, but the replacement rate of veterans with novices in stable markets is usually a lot lower than we’re currently seeing in the Facebook market, and that’s all because of Facebook’s meteoric growth.

Games Workshop, Nintendo, Mattel and Hasbro are examples of companies that have figured out how to manage a stable, renewing population of players. They’ve done so by finding or developing great, lasting games that build reputations that spread across the generations by encouraging veterans to initiate new novices.

Zynga’s games are not being built with renewal in mind. They are experiences built to appeal to novices and they inherently assume that novices are all there is. So they are simple to play, undemanding, lack challenge or consequence, and rely on time-oriented tasks. They may not realise it but Zynga, Playdom and Playfish (and others) are quietly educating millions of novices to expect more and then not delivering it to them.

Facebook’s growth rate is slowing down. It will likely hit 400m players by next March but may well never reach 500m players. So the number of novices who are impressed by very simple applications is going to fall and the number of expectant veterans will rise. The veteran mindset is more demanding, sophisticated and selective.

Veterans diversify. They have less interest in playing what everyone else is playing and more interest in playing the perfect game for them. This is fatal for a market in which the content is completely undifferentiated, as viral gaming is. Game developers relying on mass audiences will increasingly find it difficult to compete with identikit software. Veterans will feel that they have already played such games to death. They will want something more.

Veterans are also choosy sharers: When people first started to use Youtube they used to share every video they discovered. Now, Youtube users and their peers have become used to the everyday Candid Camera clips that litter Youtube, and so they want video that is worth their attention. What was fun at the novice level is boring to the veteran. Novices are thus most likely to share gaming content to all of their friends where veterans will only do so selectively.

Veterans share as a means of expression and identity. What you share says something about who you are, and so the risk of bad sharing is that of damaged reputation. Few veterans want a reputation as a spammer. So they no longer pass on every Youtube clip that comes their way to all of their friends. Instead they share selectively to groups and individuals that they think will really like the shared item. It takes a Susan Boyle moment to overcome that kind of filtering.

Advertising: The Saturation Problem

Zynga has assembled the largest player base of any viral developer partly through acquiring customers via on-platform advertising. Reportedly they have spent at least $50m doing so. In most contexts online advertising is ineffective and the Facebook environment has stayed true to form. Zynga overcome this with sheer spending power: Even the most ineffective advertising does get at least some engagement, even if it is only 1%.

Online advertising tends to attract novices who don’t easily distinguish between platform and advert and tend to be more trusting. Veterans tend to unconsciously filter adverts away from their attention unless they are well targeted and personally relevant. As a result, entertainment (such as games) is particularly difficult to sell purely through advertising unless you plan to use mass advertising at a colossal scale (as Hollywood has proven).

Products generally appeal to players on the basis of solving a problem. This usually means a functional problem or a lifestyle problem, everything from fashionable socks to cheap flights to New York. This means that they can target and establish personal relevance based on like-for-like data. Google have made a fortune with text-matching advertisements for products and blogs by realising this, and Facebook’s own advertising is best at micro-targeting advertisements based on profile information about location, interests and etc that users have entered. So the loop of successful online products and services is finding a problem that some people need to have solved, solving it for them, and then telling them about that.

Games (and movies, books, music, etc) don’t solve problems. They may, in retrospect, help solve a problem that the player never knew they had, but players don’t start looking for entertainment in a problem-solving mindset. An interest in some subjects may help you target advertisements with partial success in targeting, but for most games that really doesn’t translate into anything meaningfully useful. Like-for-like data usually translates into boredom. To be entertained, a customer needs to be surprised.

Entertainment must take us somewhere new or we quickly lose interest. This means a compelling and different story is essential, a lot of attention from media helps, and you need an advertisement or message that will punch through to people based on mass interest with enough of a budget to make it stick. It also means that an increasingly veteran audience will be less likely to pay attention. So Zynga will have to spend more to acquire them, which leads to a cycle of further saturation, lack of interest and lowering ad engagement. This is why Zynga’s recent investment haul of $180m makes sense. They need the money to market like they’ve never marketed before.

That strategy will eventually fail, however, because the games being advertised are still shallow. Zynga may well get into more interesting marketing messaging (such as big competitions) but veterans eventually realise that these are just more tricks, and so will only interact as far as is necessary to obtain their bribe or just ignore them completely if they feel the bribes are not worth it.

The only real way out of this saturation problem lies in smaller-scale, sexier and more remarkable development,  slower building of true fan-bases and building self-marketing software. This is very different from the trend-hopping, advertising-and-trick-sharing poor-software-quality strategy which viral developers have thus far employed.

Such an approach does not require deep marketing pockets and has been proven to work in the online game space before (EVE Online, Runescape, Puzzle Pirates, for example) but it’s a completely different way of approaching the whole market based on doing something different rather than copying everyone else. One for which I think none of the currently big developers really have the patience.

Equivalent Quality: The Problem with Formulaic Thinking

All the excitement over Facebook and Zynga reminds me of the Atari era:

When Atari invented Pong they realised that they were onto a good thing. They quickly established a platform that players really liked and proceeded to open the doors to other developers. Initially there were some good and interesting games but, as Atari’s platform matured, poor quality software became a problem.

Novices who were impressed that they could play Pong in their living room morphed into veterans who got tired of Pong clones. The nascent game industry, high on the quick fortunes that it was making, didn’t handle this at all well and continued to simply churn out product to cash in on trends. Deals were struck, games became an easy secondary revenue stream for the movie industry, and the publishers and the platform owners focused on extracting value rather than creating it.

An over-saturation of bad product led to a crash because the companies involved in the boom were convinced that games were a digital form of fast food. During certain periods in the history of gaming platforms, some companies have stumbled onto a way to churn content toward undemanding players and reap rewards for a period of time.

They get into the mindset that content is a “special sauce” and distribution is what really matters. And so the whole point of the games industry becomes the inventing and copying of digital Big Macs, Chickens Royale and a Fillets o Fish and shoving it down as many throats as possible before the other guy does. Competitors prefer to let each other do the heavy lifting of inventing, jump on the most promising trends with their own versions, and then really rely on distribution and marketing to win through.

A fast food formula consists of several elements:

1. Broad appeal.

2. A key game mode.

3. A mechanism to monetise players.

4. A return path.

In viral games these correspond to:

1. Simple concept games. Run a farm. Feed your fish. Play Poker.

2. The role-playing mode. All successful viral games incorporate role-playing levels and experience points, which give players goals to work toward.

3. The mechanism is virtual currency.

4.And the return path is reminders, notifications, etc.

When you have this in place you simply crank the handle. There’s just one small problem: games are not fast food.

Consumers never get bored of hamburgers because they have a biological urge to eat and – provided they don’t overdo it – they will always enjoy a familiar taste of a burger. Consumers may find that they prefer a burger from one chain over another and switch brands, but they often stick to the one they know best, so the reach of the distribution chain is what really matters.

Players do, however, get bored of Pong. Even if they utterly love the game for a time, 99% of players eventually get bored of Pong. They get bored of clones of Pong too. They don’t just switch from one Pong clone another. Instead they start to look for more from Pong-type games, driving their expectations, and – when Pong has nothing else to give, they stop playing the Pong genre.

Player boredom is not easily solved. In the short term it can be achieved by instituting a few tweaks in a successful game or genre, running competitions to attract re-engagement, or other similar behaviour. However veterans eventually get wise to that kind of behaviour. Continuous development and expansion tend to work better, which are key advantages of online games over retail games, but they too have limits if the core of the game is essentially thin.

Players also do not have to play games. That’s what Atari discovered too late: Players simply stopped buying into the platform at all. They got bored of being served the same few games in different packaging and moved on. As with Atari, the risk to Zynga is the fallacy of thinking that equivalent quality is just fine because it assumes that players are always looking to play. They’re not.

Novice players are currently consuming all sorts of games on Facebook because they are new. The software quality of viral games is generally low but players don’t seem to care for the moment. So in response, all of the major developers are simply serving the same five or six games in different packaging and they are all scrambling like crazy playing the distribution game, much like fast food chains do with their beef, chicken and fish sandwiches.

When developers assume that the task at hand is to simply get their version of a game in front of a player’s eyeballs before the competition and that quality doesn’t really matter, they are flirting with disaster. Viral game developers really do seem to believe that the only way for the adoption and profit graph to go is up because players are always looking to play.

Economists call that kind of thinking “irrational exuberance”.

There is also no guarantee that a player will simply change and play a different game. A lot of the Zynga strategy seems to revolve around pushing players from one game into another and betting on this being an eternally repeatable process. By convincing themselves that the game business is all just a matter of winning at distribution, developers forget to create real value. They assume that equivalent value among their peers is enough because players are unable to go elsewhere.

They are, of course, utterly wrong. There really is nothing stopping players from simply going elsewhere to be entertained because the Facebook audience is not a captive audience.

Bucking Trends: When Someone Makes a Great Game that is Hard to Clone

The other risk is the developer who creates a game that can’t be easily copied. Part of why the fast food model is so compelling is the assumption that the equivalent quality will remain more or less as-is and that any new games that come along can be fairly easily copied. In the Atari era this was true because the platform had hard physical limits on what it could achieve, both internally in the silicon and externally in the one-button joystick. The Facebook platform is far less constrained.

Role-playing games are among the easiest of all games to copy. The role-playing game mechanic is incredibly simple at heart: A player is simply set a series of goals and a number of activities to reach that goal, and the rest of it is just time.

World of Warcraft players call this “grinding”. In games like World of Warcraft and EVE Online, grinding has a purpose: The character that you build or the spaceship that you’ve bought is intended to be used to overcome a tough challenge like a quest or a space battle. On the other hand, in FarmVille grinding is essentially all there is. You work your farm day and night assembling money to buy new stuff to put in your farm, which enables you to grind in different ways to earn more money to buy more stuff… and so on.

The big difference between the Warcraft style of grinding and the FarmVille style of grinding is the need for game balance. Game balance in World of Warcraft is a horribly complex feat of engineering, testing and design which, even after seven years, Blizzard still obsessively correct and re-correct with every major release. On the other hand, FarmVille has no game balance at all. All that needs to be changed is a few quantities or timer lengths that players particularly complain about. It’s entirely up to the player how long they want to spend harvesting virtual wheat to buy a tractor after that.

Grind-only role-playing games also consist of essentially one game mechanic: Acquire more stuff to unlock more stuff which, when acquired, will unlock even more stuff. Everything else is just customisation. Customisation is a bit important as it allows players to express their creative side, such as building their own unique farm, but customisation tends to become less interesting as a motivation once the novelty wears off. Anecdotally, many players in Restaurant City initially spend time laying out their dream restaurant until they realise that it is inefficient. So, eventually, all players end up creating sushi bars because they are the most efficient layout.

Games which require no real game balance combined with single-mechanic game structures are incredibly easy to study and copy. It took Zynga less than three months to ramp up Farm Ville after Farm Town appeared, less time to create Fish Ville after CrowdStar’s Happy Aquarium showed its appeal, and Mafia Wars likewise cannot have taken that long to ramp up. These games have since had further development in public but it’s the time it takes Zynga to go from a standing start to a first, reasonably playable, release that allows them to turn on the marketing machine and jump on forthcoming trends.

Even the one apparent exception to this observation, Poker, actually conforms to this rule. The only actual difference between Poker games on Facebook and other role-playing games is that they incorporate a slightly more complex resolution mechanic (the Poker playing). The goal is still much the same, i.e. acquiring levels and virtual stuff, and the game mechanic used to perform resolution is just Poker. Poker is completely generic and easy to clone.

So the big problem that Zynga has on the development front is a developer who comes along with a game that they can’t immediately decode and replicate. For example:

1. Real-time or Turn-based strategy. It takes a lot of effort to make a desktop tower defence game that feels good, and likewise to make a turn-based strategy game that isn’t rubbish. Zynga used to have its own strategy game which performed poorly because it simply wasn’t very interesting, and it’s hard to just create a strategy game on spec.

2. Physics-based games. A lot of Flash casual developers are getting very good at making action and physics based games, and some of these are starting to show up on Facebook. Physics is not easy to copy quickly because it takes a lot of time and testing to get the ‘feel’ factor right.

3. Content-heavy games. Games with stories, puzzles, adventure elements, production values and so on are not that easy to just make.

4. Hard simulation games. The difference between FarmVille and The Sims is massive and it’s all because Farm Ville has no deep rewards and little emergence whereas The Sims has a much more elaborate and emergent structure that keeps players interested for years.

With each of the four examples above, the key difference is time to market. FarmVille got to market in only 12-16 weeks, but a first-release copy of a great strategy game could easily take 28-36 weeks – probably more – to get anywhere near good. That’s too late to jump on a trend, as Playfish’s late entries in poker and farming show.

The viral developers thus have a very big problem: They have little internal culture that rewards taking the time to do good game development, and so any new developers that come onto the scene that do will start to draw in veteran players in a way that the viral companies cannot easily match. Viral developers, being ultimately trend-hoppers, are no good as trend-setters.

For example:

* Vikings of Thule is attempting to create a role-playing game with complex combats that require active participation. It is currently very small and probably too niche to attract mass interest, but it is interesting.

* Civilization, the famous strategy game, will be appearing on Facebook next year and is likely to prove a highly celebrated cross-over game. Civ has sophisticated and complicated game mechanics while at the same time being quite accessible. It stands a very good chance of changing many players’ expectations about what Facebook games can be.

Short Term / Long Term

Fundamentally the problem that Zynga has is that it has spent all of its time acquiring players and no time turning them into real fans. They’re only thinking short term, and have much the same attitude toward players as amusement arcades once did – extract value quickly and move on. As a result they are failing to do the most important thing that any internet-based company must do:

Build a following.

Entertainment is like dating. You should always strive to be sexy.  Sexiness is all about creativity, credibility, charisma and character. Sexy people are at the forefront. Sexy people have a sense of mission and identity that they have made their own. Sexy people are personal, interested and responsive. Sexy people flirt with you. They don’t rip you off. They don’t make you feel used. And in return, sexy people develop followings. Smart sexy people make you feel loved. Really smart sexy people continually reinvent themselves and still bring their original followers along for the ride.

Viral game companies are not sexy. Their brands and core values are generic brands that nobody wants to date and values that are entirely based on commercialism of a short term opportunity. The only people who find viral game companies sexy are the investment community and startup news sites like Mashable because of the earnings and valuation speculation.

To be sexy in games means going to the edges of mainstream experience and finding something that brings interested people along for the ride. Games Workshop has been at the edge of the board and war gaming industry for a long time by cleaving to a dark style and a compelling game world, and their audience is loyal enough to spend hundreds of pounds per year on lead figurines. Blizzard has been at the edge of videogames by laying down a stamp of “done when it’s done” messaging to development and forming a distinctive character to every game they do. They’ve been so successful that World of Warcraft by itself is often held responsible for sucking all the money out of PC retail games.

Zynga has no sex appeal. They make generic games with generic names (Restaurant/ Cafe/ Bistro/ Hospital/ Farm/ Monster Town/Ville /City /Village /Country / Story/ Wars) and un-ambitious vision. Their games are neither inherently memorable nor compelling. For most players, they’re just something to pass the time.

Their challenge, therefore, is to take what they have learned so far and invest in the future. If Facebook are making deep changes to their platform and handing the opt-out power back to players, then Zynga cannot survive by just looking for another way to trick and spam players back into FarmVille. They need to take their $180m investment and use it to build a real following.

They could build a portal, independent from Facebook, or even a competing social network to become their own platform. Alternatively they could invest in larger, better games or more complex and complete virtual worlds. They could broaden out to smaller, more indie and creatively-oriented developers and become an aggregator or partner network. Such a strategy would result in better and more diverse content.

Realistically though, I think they plan to do none of those things. I think what they will actually do is spend the $180m on trying to replicate their previous viral success through increased advertising spend. Maybe Zynga can figure out a way to leverage Facebook’s own ads to target to players as reminders. That would be much more in-character for a company as competitive and in-the-now as Zynga has proven itself to be.

Zynga’s coffers are deep, as are Playdom and Playfish’s, but at the heart of their model are some deep weaknesses that are going to let a lot of the air out of their Fast Food business models. The audience expectations are going to shift, the key factors enabling the business model likewise, and while it’s been a great short term success this year, viral gaming doesn’t seem to have any more easy wins left.

Now comes the hard part. Diversification, experimentation and deep design breeding interesting ideas do not grow on trees and companies need to commit to them to see them through. Right now that’s not the Zynga way.

Twelve months from now it will be the companies that have managed to diversify, build strong followings and create real value that will be the new darlings of the scene. Those that do not adapt will still be there but their story will be one of difficulty. As social games come to the end of their beginning, Zynga is increasingly look like an Atari-era publisher leading the charge but unlikely to capitalise in the longer term because they’re too busy thinking they’re in the burger business. （Source：Gamasutra）