作者：Douglas MacMillan/Brad Stone

Joelle Ibgui乐于收集各种各样的马匹，这些马匹都不是真实的动物，而是Zynga旗下热门在线游戏《FarmVille》中的虚拟动物。30岁的房地产经理Ibgui来自纽约州Kew Gardens，自两年前《FarmVille》发布时就开始玩，去年在她的游戏及农场中花了500多美元。她说道：“去年冬天有段时间，我每天花6个小时玩这款游戏。它确实会让人沉迷，会让人忘记接电话。”

Zynga game(from businessweek)

7月1日，Zynga向证券交易委员会申请在首次公开募股中募集10亿美元资金。对于那些无视科技行业泡沫说法的投资者来说，公司目前的统计数字确实相当诱人：这家位于旧金山的公司有2亿多月活跃用户，去年公司盈利为5.97亿美元，净收入为9060万美元，与2009年相比增加了5倍。截止3月，公司的季度利润为1180万美元。

Zynga的产品都是免费游戏，通过出售虚拟道具来盈利，乐于收集的玩家、竞争性玩家和偏执玩家都自愿花钱购买这些商品。Zynga在招股说明书中指出了公司的风险因素：“几乎所有盈利都来源于小部分玩家。”有个不愿意透露姓名的前Zynga雇员谈及公司的内部问题时表示，Zynga的付费玩家比例不及10%，而公司1/4到半数的盈利来源于不足1%的玩家。借用拉斯维加斯的说法，这些玩家属于鲸鱼用户。

据熟悉Zynga的人所称，公司内部确实也将这种高盈利玩家视为鲸鱼用户，给予他们VIP白金俱乐部会员。鲸鱼用户可以获得特别折扣价，可以通过银行账户直接向Zynga支付500美元甚至更多的费用。但该公司谢绝对这类说法发表评论。

某匿名人士对Zynga的业务很熟悉，因为其公司与Zynga有合作关系，他表示有用户每年在单款Zynga游戏上便花费7.5万美元。CrowdStar是Zynga的竞争对手，旗下有2400万玩家，其中每年花费1万美元以上的用户约为200名左右，其首席执行官Peter Relan说道：“驱动拉斯维加斯赌徒的因素是能够赢钱，而驱动社交游戏玩家的因素是你可以比好友更为成功。在这两个例子中，产品利用的都是玩家的情感和心理需求。”

那么，鲸鱼用户究竟是哪些人呢？Relan和其他虚拟商品公司的执行官表示，鲸鱼用户通常是相对较为富裕的年长玩家。他们愿意付费以在众好友中取得领先地位，或者跳过完成必要任务的艰难阶段（游戏邦注：比如《CityVille》中建造建筑和收集租金的过程），赚取游戏内置货币来购买更多虚拟道具。Tagged是家位于旧金山的社交网络和游戏公司，有1亿个注册用户，该公司表示在上半年期间，46%的游戏盈利来源于付费金额数最高的1%玩家。这些玩家中，半数是美国人，而这些美国玩家有59%是平均年龄为48岁的男性。Tagged首席执行官Greg Tseng表示：“许多鲸鱼玩家没有耐心或足够的时间来做游戏中所需的各种事情，于是他们就会投入大量金钱来继续在游戏中进展下去。”

Zynga游戏《FarmVille》每周至少更新两次虚拟商品。公司还利用限时和稀有性来提升道具的价值。2010年2月，Zynga将Unwither Ring引入《FarmVille》，该道具可以确保玩家的作物不会枯萎和死亡。这个道具的价格为250农场币，约为50美元左右，自道具首次出现后只在有限的时期内出售数次。《Mafia Wars》是Zynga首批轰动市场的巨作之一，玩家与玩家之间的枪战等游戏部分会诱惑用户花钱购买额外的能量点数和武器来增加获胜几率。在线游戏网络Hi5总裁Alex St. John说道：“以鲸鱼用户为目标来设计游戏是可取做法，因为取悦所有玩家并非易事。”对于那些不愿意花钱玩游戏的用户来说，任何花言巧语都无法诱使他们打开钱包。尽管社交游戏在Facebook上的确很流行，但是St. John认为Facebook Credits的交易过程会让多数玩家感到麻烦，只有那些最忠实的铁杆玩家例外。

投资者在仔细审核Zynga所公布的数据数周后，提出了一些问题：该公司是否过于依赖于Facebook？是否能够不断制作出诸如《FarmVille》、《CityVille》和新战略战斗游戏《Empires & Allies》之类轰动市场的作品？最重要的是，公司是否能够不断吸引鲸鱼用户？Tagged的Tseng认为，出售虚拟商品是种很有效的销售模式，因为所有人都可以根据自己的需要来付费。休闲用户可以选择免费玩游戏，骨灰级用户乐衷于付费取得更好的成就。无论玩家选择何种游戏方式，开发商制作和销售虚拟商品都无需任何成本。他说道：“每个玩家都有自己的心理价位，这就是虚拟货币模式的真正价值所在。”

然而，有些极度狂热的玩家想知道，Zynga是否想不断给鲸鱼用户提出过高要求。Ibgui为自己收集的马和矮人感到自豪，但是令她懊恼的是，Zynga开始逐渐加快发布道具的频率而且售价不断上涨。休斯敦退休护士Christine Marie Wilson在数个月的时间里，几乎将所有的空闲时间都投入到《FarmVille》中，还从沃尔玛购买Zynga礼品卡。今年早期她决定彻底离开游戏，因为她意识到自己已经上瘾，甚至因此而欺骗家人。她说道：“我就像是个赌徒，我都不敢将自己玩游戏的事情告诉家人。”

游戏邦注：本文发稿于2011年7月6日，所涉时间、事件和数据均以此为准。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Zynga’s Quest for Big-Spending Whales

Douglas MacMillan/Brad Stone

Joelle Ibgui collects horses. Lots of horses. In her stable of 108 colorful creatures is a Clydesdale, an Asian wild foal, a spotted appaloosa, and a clown pony, which sports a bow tie, a red honk nose, and a rainbow-colored wig—and cost about $5. The pony and its companions are not real animals, of course, but virtual ones in the hit online game FarmVille, produced by Zynga, the hottest gaming company on the Web and soon, perhaps, on Wall Street. Ibgui, a 30-year-old real estate manager from Kew Gardens, N.Y., has played FarmVille since its introduction two years ago and last year spent more than $500 to burnish her farm and get ahead in the game. “In the winter there came a point when I was playing six hours a day,” she says. “It does get addictive. It does get to the point where you’re not picking up your phone when it’s ringing.”

On July 1, Zynga filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission to raise up to $1 billion in a sure-to-be blockbuster initial public offering. To investors immune to ominous talk of tech bubbles, the numbers look alluring: The San Francisco company has 232 million active monthly users; last year it posted a net income of $90.6 million on revenue of $597 million, which was up fivefold from 2009. In the quarter that ended in March, profit was $11.8 million.

Although its games are free-to-play and widely accessible on Facebook, Zynga makes money by selling virtual items that are avidly hoarded by collectors, competitive players, and obsessives. Among the risk factors Zynga listed in its prospectus: “We rely on a small percentage of our players for nearly all of our revenue.” It didn’t specify the percentage of people willing to fork over a few dollars for a virtual barn, building, or tractor, but multiple people familiar with the booming business of digital goods, including one former Zynga employee who did not want to be named discussing internal matters, suggest that less than 10 percent of Zynga’s players spend money and less than 1 percent are responsible for between a quarter and a half of the company’s revenue. Las Vegas has a name for that kind of incredibly profitable patron: whales.

Game makers don’t like to talk about whale management, but people familiar with Zynga say it does internally refer to its high-value customers as whales and has offered them membership in a VIP “Platinum” club. Whales get special discounts and can wire sums of $500 or more directly from their bank accounts to Zynga. The company declined to comment for this story, citing its SEC-mandated quiet period.

One person familiar with Zynga’s business, who requested not to be named because his company works with Zynga, says a user spent $75,000 in one year on a single game. “The compulsion in Vegas is the illusion you can make money. The compulsion in social games is the illusion you can be more successful than your friends,” says Peter Relan, chief executive officer of CrowdStar, a Zynga rival that has about 24 million players, including as many as 200 people who spend more than $10,000 a year. “In both cases, you’re working with people’s emotions and psychological needs.”

So who are these whales? Relan and executives at other virtual-goods companies say they tend to be comparatively wealthy, older players. They’re also willing to pay to get ahead and avoid the slog of achievement—such as constructing buildings and collecting rent in CityVille—usually necessary to earn the in-game currency for buying virtual items. Tagged, a San Francisco social network and gaming company with 100 million registered users, says that for the first six months of the year, the top 1 percent of its players accounted for 46 percent of its gaming revenue. About half of those were American, and 59 percent of those U.S. players were male with an average age of 48. “A lot of these whales don’t have the patience or the time to go through all the stuff by playing,” says Greg Tseng, Tagged’s CEO who recently hired a former Myspace customer service executive to build a VIP concierge service to give deals to its best players. “They just dump in a lot of money to get ahead.”

Zynga’s FarmVille features virtual-goods updates at least twice a week. (Among the most recent were a Fourth of July decorative water fountain and a Charro gnome, part of a limited edition Mexico-themed collection.) The company also cultivates scarcity to drive up the value of items. In February 2010, Zynga introduced an Unwither Ring in FarmVille, which guarantees a player’s crops will never wilt and die from neglect. The item cost 250 in farm cash, or around $50, and has been offered only a few times for limited periods since it was first introduced. Mafia Wars, one of Zynga’s first hits, is built around what game designers call “sinks”—parts of the game, such as player-vs.-player gun fights, that motivate users to sink money into additional energy points and weapons to increase their chances to win. “You might as well target whales because targeting everyone else is too difficult,” says Alex St. John, president of online gaming network Hi5. As for those who play without spending, there’s probably nothing that will coax them to open their wallets. And despite the popularity of social games on Facebook, St. John says the process of buying Facebook Credits, which users purchase to convert into currency for specific games, is too confusing for everyone but the most committed players.

As investors scrutinize Zynga’s numbers in the weeks ahead, they’ll have a lot to consider: whether the company is too dependent on Facebook, whether it can keep minting hits such as FarmVille, CityVille, and its new strategy-and-combat game Empires & Allies, and particularly, whether it can keep reeling in whales. Tseng from Tagged thinks the virtual goods model is brilliantly efficient, because it allows everyone to pay what they want to pay. Casual users play for free; hard-core addicts pay through the nose. Either way, it costs virtually nothing to create and sell a virtual good. “Every player has their own price,” he says. “Really that is the beauty of the virtual currency model.”

Some of its most enthusiastic players, though, wonder if Zynga is asking too much of its whales. Ibgui, who proudly shows off pictures of her horse and gnome collections, frets that Zynga has started releasing too many items too quickly and at inflated prices. “They are pushing it,” she says. “It makes them come across as money-hungry.” Then there are players such as Christine Marie Wilson, a retired paramedic from Houston who for months played FarmVille nearly “every spare minute” and bought Zynga gift cards at Wal-Mart (WMT) at every opportunity. Earlier this year she quit the game entirely, after recognizing that it had become an addiction that she was concealing even from her family. “I was like a gambler,” she says. “I hid it pretty well from them.” (Source: Bloomberg Businessweek)