作者：Matt

Zynga是社交游戏领域的巨头，其热门游戏《Farmville》在2010年初的MAU高达6900万，甚至超越了Twitter用户。Zynga有效利用虚拟产品和广告，从这些用户身上获得不菲的收益。

某天，我观看了Zynga创始人及首席执行官Mark Pincus和风险投资公司KPCB的Bing Gordon的播客节目。在节目中，Mark分享了Zynga之所以能够开发出成功社交游戏的秘诀。与多数成功的初创企业一样，Mark使用的是用户开发和快速迭代方法。

zynga-logo(from app100.net)

Zynga评估市场需求的方法

–用5个词描述一款新产品或新功能

–将提案挂到高流量网站上接受用户检验

–如果获得点击数，就收集对它感兴趣的用户电子邮箱

–制作该功能的快速成型版本

–测试

–持续迭代

Mark Pincus(from grattisfaction)

Mark Pincus谈游戏测试和最小可行性产品（游戏邦注：以下内容摘自原视频，根据理解需要，已稍作调整）

……我喜欢那些头脑里有伟大想法的人，他们通常是游戏设计师，他们的想法非常了不起。举个例子，他们想做一个医院的模拟游戏。

我们就对他们的想法进行测试。如果一开始我们就冒然做出完整版，那要耗费相当多的工时。但如果我们的测试做得对，他们就不会被累坏。他们的日子会轻松些，而我们也会得到成功的产品，这就是我们都想要的结果。

我对营销经理或产品经理说：“好啦，现在这个想法雏形出来了。已经六个月了，我们做出了你所构想的产品，你打算什么营销它？请用5个词回答我。”

我们会在网上提供一个链接：“嘿！你曾想过经营自己的医院吗？”

这个链接可能会针对用户做一个在线调查，你留下自己的电邮地址，我们承诺当结果出来时，我们将联系你……

首先，你得了解这个想法的热度，也就是看看人们有多喜欢它……

一旦我们完成一款游戏，或者说是一种新功能，你就可以解构其中的交互式功能特征——例如赠礼会增加游戏扩散性或粘性或收益。然后我们就会把它添加到能够在一周内完成的功能列表里——我们会对它进行AB测试和流动试验，公开百分之一的内容。

我们建立一个数据库和测试平台，这样我们就可以在任何给定时间对任何一款游戏行进数百个游戏测试。每个用户只能测试一次。

我们喜欢做测试。因为我们可以很清楚地看到反馈参数的变化，之后我们开始制作完整版。

我举个例子，我们在《Farmville》加入花朵，所以现在你可以大量种植花朵了。如果假期季来临，我们允许你升级花朵，然后做出自己的创意花束，这个主意怎么样呢？

在和用户进行测试之前，我们不会直奔这个想法埋头苦干。

真是太妙了。这就是你进入互联网3.0时代后将拥有的功能，你将运营一项服务，你每周都能进行用户测试，这是我在以前的公司从来没有遇到过的。

你不必经历“三个月完工，然后祈祷游戏受到欢迎”的这种过程了。

游戏邦注：原文发表于2010年9月，所述事件以当时为背景。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

How Zynga Uses Ghetto Testing and Minimum Viable Products

By Matt

Zynga is a social gaming giant.  Farmville,their largest game, has more than 69 million monthly active users, making it larger than Twitter. Unlike many companies, Zynga also monetizes these users effectively with virtual goods and advertising. Zynga makes a huge amount of real money – while the company is private, 2009 revenues are projected to be around $100 million.

Today I listened to a podcast of a talk from Mark Pincus, CEO/Founder of Zynga and Bing Gordon of KPCB.  In this podcast, Mark shared some of Zynga’s methods of creating phenomenally successful social games.  As with almost all successful start-ups, Mark uses an appropriate version of customer development and rapid iteration.

Mark talked about how they assess demand for new products and features without taking up engineering hours.  All of his methods are pure customer development/agile start-up.

How Zynga Assesses Market Demand

- Create a 5-word pitch for a new product or feature

- Put it up on a high traffic webpage

- If it gets clicks, collect the emails of interested customers

- Build a ‘ghetto’ version of the feature

- Test everything

- Iterate constantly

Mark Pincus on Ghetto Testing and Minimum Viable Products

(Words are by Mark Pincus, transcribed and slightly paraphrased for clarity and grammar.  Emphases are my own.)

Mark Pincus:  We do something at Zynga that I call “ghetto testing.” I like to take someone who has a gigantic idea, usually a game designer, and they have some gigantic idea that this would just be great…  Maybe they really want a hospital simulation game…

We want to ghetto test it.  Again, we have so many bullets(engineering hours) we can fire, and we’ve got to just treasure and honor our engineers.  If we do our job right, they don’t get burned out.  They have a great life and we have successful products, so that’s what we want.

So I say to the marketing person or the product manager, “Describe it in five words.  It’s built.  If six months from now we built every dream you have, how are you going to market it?  Give me the five words.”

We’ll put that up.  We’ll put up a link for five minutes saying, ” Hey!  Do you ever fantasize about running your own hospital?” (laughter)  And, well, maybe you have!  In this economy, it’s the only growth area.

We’ll put that up for five minutes, and the link will maybe take you to a survey, where you give us your email and we say when this comes out we’ll contact you. If you’re really doing ghetto, it says ’404 not found’.  That’s bad.

So first you try to get the heat around it, you see how much do people like it, then…

(Brief discussion of usage metrics… they’re huge!)

Once we get to the point of actually building a game, or building a new feature, which we love Bing [Gordon's] idea of golden mechanics.  You should take away and steal it from us, the idea of not a game, but a feature that you can deconstruct and see that this interactive feature – a way to do a gift will drive virality or retention or revenues. So we put it in a feature we can build in a week – it’s a ghetto build we AB test it, we flow test it, we put it out to one percent.

We built a data warehouse with a testing platform so we’re running several hundred tests at any given time for every one of our games.  And no single user has more than one test.

So, we love tests.  When we see that it moves our metrics in a considerable way, that’s when we take it to be a full feature roll-out, and then we do the whole 2.0.

So, one example, we just turned on flowers in Farmville.   So now you can plant and grow beautiful flowers.  There’s so many place you could take flowers.  The holiday season is coming up – what happens if we let you level up your flowers and create your own custom bouquets?

But we don’t want to go down those paths until we test them with our users.

What’s amazing, and this is a feature that you will all have available as you enter this third internet era, is that you’re going to run a service, and you’re going to test things every week with your users, something that I never had available to me at previous companies.

It won’t be ‘build it for three months and hope and pray.’（source:grattisfaction）