作者：DGHOANG

Zynga不是社交游戏市场上首个成功的公司，但却是首个做到产品与市场相契合的公司。通过Zynga与其他游戏公司的对比，这一点是显而易见的。所有初创公司都不可避免会经历方向调整阶段。

公司分析：

Zynga——Zynga是个社交游戏开发商。Zynga的使命是通过游戏将人们同他们的好友联系起来。每天有数百万的人同他们的好友互动，通过游戏表现出他们独特的个性，形式包括作物收获、切苹果和玩扑克等。Mark Pincus于2007年7月创建Zynga。公司旗下的顶级游戏有《CityVille》、《FarmVille》、《Zynga Poker》和《Mafia Wars》。

Zynga-Poker(from getandroidstuff.com)

PlayFirst——PlayFirst是个发行具有情感吸引力的互动娱乐产品的发行商。公司的使命是让所有人每天都能体验到乐趣。PlayFirst团队制作富有吸引力的故事化游戏世界，将高质量游戏体验传播到各个流行平台上。该公司于2004年由行业资深人士创建。PlayFirst取得最大商业成功的便是其《Diner Dash》系列作品，该系列已经在全球获得逾5.5亿次下载量。公司旗下还有许多产品，包括《Wedding Dash》、《Cooking Dash》、《Chocolatier》和《Dream Chronicles》。

接受采访者：Zynga休闲和手机游戏部门副总裁Vishal Makhijani；PlayFirst总裁兼首席执行官Mari Baker；Mayfield Fund常务董事兼PlayFirst投资者及董事会成员Janice Roberts。

Zynga：在竞争激烈的领域内取得巨大成功

从市值、盈利和用户活跃度等各个方面来看，Zynga无疑都是取得巨大成功的公司。我们希望通过与其他游戏公司的对比来探究Zynga的成功之道，PlayFirst便是个合适的对象，该公司通过《Diner Dash》同样取得商业上的成功。通过我们与两个公司高管及投资者的交谈，发现Zynga和PlayFirst采用了不同的方法，因而所取得成功的层次也有所不同。毫无疑问，Zynga取得了更大的成功，原因有以下3个方面：

1、专注于参数分析——特别关注留存率、数据使用和决策

2、游戏设计的适用面更广——产品与市场相契合

3、用户曝光过程——迭代，平台，团队精神和产品开发

专注于参数分析

Zynga

Zynga的成功主要仰赖于公司以分析和参数为导向的设计文化。自Mark Pincus创立公司之日起，这种思想便在公司文化中根深蒂固。Vish Makhijani说道：“2008年左右，应用经济仍处于发展初期，许多社交游戏公司将病毒性传播视为成功的关键指标，许多公司确实因此而获得了庞大的用户量。问题在于，他们的用户流失率也很高。用户首次安装并使用应用后，就不会再次打开应用。Mark很快就意识到，要构建起庞大的活跃用户群，专注于病毒性是不够的，留存率才是关键。相对于病毒性而言，我们对游戏留存率的控制力度也更大。”而且，许多早期的社交游戏的内容质量不高，这会进一步提升玩家流失率。为解决这个问题，Zynga雇佣高质量游戏设计师，专注于提升游戏的质量，使游戏获得更高的留存率。为进一步提升留存率，下个步骤就是专注于参与度，有条不紊、循序渐进地推广游戏。参与度指标达到标准后，他们就会通过各种病毒性渠道来提升应用安装量，并且不断重复这个过程，确保参与度水平保持不变。每款新游戏的发布都会采用同样的运作方式。

我们已经知道，在早期的用户开发过程中，专注于参数分析是非常重要的。以Facebook为例，公司可以查看到平台上庞大的用户信息，可以先让小部分用户试用新产品，然后逐渐推广，News Feed采用的便是这种方法。根据用户试用得到的数据显示，News Feed的出现让用户的参与度有所提升，于是公司便可以放心的推行，不必担心会受到用户的指责和排斥。TellMe也依靠量化数据来改良公司的销售过程，确保销售团队可以把产品提供给真正需要的客户。在社交游戏这片竞争激烈的领域里，Zynga与其他公司的主要差别之处就在于，公司时刻跟踪那些对特定业务起到重要作用的指标。相比之下，诸如RockYou等Zynga的竞争者，他们早期的做法是专注于病毒性成长，通过发布简单的休闲游戏应用来抢占更多用户。

PlayFirst

PlayFirst以参数为导向的设计文化正逐渐消失。公司专注于开发和优化那些让团队充满激情的游戏。这意味着，游戏往往需要更长的开发时间才能最终发布，而且并没有大量数据帮助塑造和构建游戏。Mari Baker说道：“我们专注于对旗下产品进行广泛的分析，这可能的确需要耗费更多的时间，但是开发者的激情会让游戏充满生机。热情的开发者往往会推动游戏获得内在成长。”虽然参数指标对PlayFirst来说也很重要，但是我们可以看到，对游戏的激情才是公司发布游戏的真正驱动力。这与Zynga的做法相反，对Zynga而言，留存率指标数值才是成功的关键指示器。

游戏设计适用面广——产品与市场相契合

Zynga

Zynga并非锁定某个特定游戏类别，比如第一人称射击、RPG或其他针对特定用户群体的游戏类型，Zynga将公司游戏开发的全部精力放在拥有广大吸引面的游戏类型上。公司的主要动机在于，尽可能地获取更多休闲游戏用户的青睐，而不是仅限于某个特别的用户群体。Vish说道：“我们想要的是大众市场，其他游戏开发工作室针对的是市场中的部分玩家。而我们的产品能够吸引到更庞大的用户数，男女兼有。”这种想法也与公司的指标驱动战略相契合。因为针对大众市场，公司可以在用户曝光过程的每个阶段获得相当多的安装量。为了适应休闲用户的需要，Zynga也尽量让他们的游戏易于理解和体验。这对游戏参与度和留存率指标的提升都有帮助，同时可满足大众诉求。

Playfirst

Playfirst最初专注于PC网页游戏这个未被充分开发的市场。PlayFirst首席执行官Baker说道：“我们发现了一个还存在开发空间的市场。那些家庭主妇在照料孩子后便无事可做，于是我们瞄准了这块市场。”PlayFirst努力开辟游戏行业尚未关注的市场领域（游戏邦注：比如针对家庭主妇制作游戏）。这种想法确实让PlayFirst获得了成功。公司首款轰动市场的巨作《Diner Dash》的下载量超过5.5亿次，随后公司接连发布了一系列“日常生活模拟”游戏，得到了目标用户的积极反响，比如《Wedding Dash》、《Cooking Dash》和《Chocolatier》。但是，随着市场的发展，PlayFirst发现了公司的局限性。PlayFirst继续专注于其目标市场，没有扩展产品所涉用户的范围。PlayFirst投资者和董事会成员Janice Roberts说道：“DNA团队的战略改变变得很困难，因为团队此前专注于他们所擅长的领域。”PlayFirst公司专注于小众市场，让公司获得了成功，但是却没有像Zynga那样扩展产品的用户范围，使得公司的成长面临瓶颈。

Zynga和PlayFirst遇到的两难选择是，所做产品是要与横向市场还是纵向市场相契合，这也是Documentum经常遇到的问题。Jeff Miller和Documentum做出决定，公司需要专注于纵向市场。尽管这种企业发展模型确实很不错，但在休闲游戏这个由用户驱动的领域里，Zynga采用的横向市场发展似乎更为恰当。PlayFirst专注于休闲玩家的纵向市场，相当于让公司无法触及休闲游戏市场的其他用户，而Zynga有着更广大的用户吸引面，其中包括PlayFirst所针对的用户群体。

diner dash(from cimaxgames.com)

用户曝光过程

Zynga

尽管Zynga做出可用产品所需的时间和成本逐渐增加，但是与动视和EA等传统游戏工作室相比仍算很少。据Vish所述，公司非常信赖Steve Blank提出的用户曝光过程，努力做到每次发布新产品都在这方面做得更好。

快速迭代便是公司游戏开发方法的核心。他们的目标是尽量发布更多游戏，快速地察觉到失败，降低失败成本。帮助他们实现这种快速迭代和用户反馈过程的元素有：团队的指标驱动DNA，他们的产品传播平台（游戏邦注：即Facebook），对系统和缩放模块性的关注。

团队DNA：正如我们在第1部分中所讨论的那样，公司极为关注留存率指标，因而他们知道在新游戏发布后需要跟踪哪些信息，随后就可以根据获得的信息展开措施。

平台：专注于在Facebook平台上发布游戏，使他们可以快速地接触到新用户群体，有助于收集所需的指标数据。专注于Facebook还意味着他们无需担心游戏的传播，可以专注于游戏开发。这是非常重要的，因为他们的用户曝光过程的大部分措施可以用在多款游戏的发布中，这样公司便可以知晓哪款游戏真正受用户欢迎。

模块性：Zynga已经构建起可升级系统，杜绝了新游戏的发布和运营风险，将新游戏发布的边际成本最小化。他们在运营中采用基于服务的方法，在游戏开发中采用开源方法，这两者都可以实现快速迭代。

Playfirst

Baker说道：“我们喜欢构建高质量游戏，这些游戏需要4个月到2年的时间才能看出其表现。”通常情况下，PlayFirst会确保游戏在发布之时功能齐全。他们最初选择的传播平台是PC浏览器，公司无法在该平台上实现快速迭代。玩家下载并体验游戏后，往往不会给PlayFirst提供反馈意见。PlayFirst有3种发布新游戏的方法：

1、探索游戏的背景深度，更新游戏

2、仿制其他开发商成功赢得用户青睐的产品

3、发行第三方开发商提供的游戏

尽管从某种程度上来说这些方法的确对PlayFirst有效，但是目前他们还未拥有自己的用户曝光过程。根据Blank的说法，他们并不采用初创公司的准则。PlayFirst并没有采用快速而低失败代价的方法，却依然有这么多巨作。当被问及PlayFirst是否会考虑发布未全部完成的游戏时，Baker说道：“我们不喜欢这么做。我们真心希望能够给予用户高质量体验，因而更偏向于发布功能完善的游戏。”这便是团队DNA之间的差异，Zynga的团队DNA采用的是快速而低失败代价和快速迭代的原则。

Roberts说道：“我们的错误在于行动不够迅速。根深蒂固的团队DNA导致我们没有在需要开展行动的时候做出改变。”团队不仅应当转向制作有更广泛受众的游戏，还应当在新传播平台出现时展开行动。公司最初尝试在Facebook平台上发布游戏，但于2008年末取消这项战略，因为该平台对公司的作用并没有达到预期效果。Baker说道：“我们撤出Facebook是个错误的战略，我们应当继续在这个平台上坚持下去。”根据Roberts的说法，当时团队不适合或没有足够的灵活性来尝试新平台。管理团队过分信赖他们的目标用户和平台，因而并没有针对行业发生的改变进行创新和探索。相比之下，Hulu案例的经验似乎更值得借鉴。事实上，Hulu的创建正是来源于技术上的革新（游戏注：比如宽带的出现）。Netflix的Reed Hastings接受了流媒体技术，为消费者提供了优质的娱乐体验。如此看来，最初成立PlayFirst的团队并未拥有让公司轰动市场的DNA，因此该公司才会在2009年更换了首席执行官。

Zynga：将成为这10年来获得最大成功的公司之一

尽管PlayFirst在这个市场上抢先一步，但是就盈利和用户参与的积极性来说，Zynga很显然是市场的主宰者。PlayFirst本来有机遇成就今日Zynga的伟业，但是其曝光过程不够理想、市场定位过于狭碍、无法吸引用户注意力导致了公司的失败。

游戏邦注：本文发稿于2011年8月30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: A Rocket Ship to Success Through Product-Market Fit

DGHOANG

It’s never the first company to market that wins; it’s the first company to product-market fit. This was evident through Zynga’s success versus other gaming companies. All startups inevitably go through pivots (change in direction). I wrote this paper with Alex Gurevich over at Javelin Partners.

Companies analyzed:

Zynga – Zynga is a social games developer on the web. Zynga’s mission is to connect people with their friends through games. Every day millions of people interact with their friends and express their unique personalities through their games, which range from harvesting crops to slicing apples to playing poker. Zynga was founded in July 2007 by Mark Pincus. Top games include CityVille, FarmVille, Zynga Poker, and Mafia Wars.

PlayFirst – PlayFirst is a publisher of emotionally engaging interactive entertainment. The company’s mission is to deliver delightful play for everybody, everyday. By creating engaging story worlds that capture the imagination, PlayFirst teams publish quality gaming experiences across popular platforms. The company was founded in 2004 by industry veterans. PlayFirst’s biggest commercial success has been its award-winning Diner Dash series, which has been downloaded by more than 550 million people around the world. The company’s game portfolio also includes other titles, such as Wedding Dash, Cooking Dash, Chocolatier, and Dream Chronicles.

Interviews with:

Vishal Makhijani – SVP Casual and Mobility Divisions of Zynga

Mari Baker – President and CEO of PlayFirst

Janice Roberts – Managing Director of Mayfield Fund and PlayFirst investor/board member

Zynga: A Runaway Hit in a Crowded Space

With a valuation of close to $10 billion, annual revenues of about $1 billion, and with over 50+ million daily active users, Zynga by all measures has been a runaway hit. Top-tier Silicon Valley investors have poured in over $500 million to fuel the company’s growth over the last four years. We wanted to examine Zynga’s rocket ship success versus other gaming companies, notably PlayFirst, who had some commercial success through their game Diner Dash (550 million downloads). Through our conversations with key executives at each company and speaking to investors, we examine Zynga and PlayFirst’s specific approaches which drove them to very different levels of success. Zynga is the unambiguous winner due to three factors:

Focus on metrics – particularly a maniacal focus on retention, use of data, and decision making

Broad applicability of game design – product-market fit

Customer discovery process – iteration, platform, team DNA, and product development

Focus on Metrics

Zynga

Zynga’s success can be primarily linked to their religious dedication to metrics and analytics. This has been engrained in the DNA from day one by their founder Mark Pincus. According to Vish Makhijani, “in the beginning of the app economy around 2008, there were many social game companies focusing on virality as their key metric of success and many of them reached notoriety and large user bases. The problem was though that they had very high decay rates. User would install apps, play it once, and then never visit the app again. Mark quickly realized that the way to build a large active user base was not just to focus on virality but primarily on retention. Retention was also something that we had more control over [unlike virality].” Furthermore, many of the early competitor games were lacking the content quality, which attributed to these high decay rates. To combat this, Zynga hired top quality game designers and focused on delivering excellent game play quality, which contributed to higher retention. The next step of increasing retention was to focus on the engagement numbers and rolling out the games in a more methodical, gradual way. Once the metrics on engagement were up to par, they would turn on various viral channels to increase the installed base, and repeat the process to ensure that engagement levels remained the same. Every new title released would get a similar treatment.

We have seen the importance of a dedication to metrics in the early customer development process. For instance, Facebook, by having access to their own large user base, was able to gradually role out products by first validating them with a smaller subset of users as was the case with the News Feed. Backed up by the data from these early trails and the knowledge that, in fact, engagement was increased with the presence of a News Feed, allowed them to preserve in the face of harsh criticism and initial user backlash. Likewise, in an enterprise setting, TellMe relied on quantitative, as well as qualitative data, to refine their sales process to ensure that the sales team was pursuing accounts that would really move the needle (i.e. through their Rifle project). Zynga’s chief differentiator, in a highly competitive landscape, was a similar resolution to track the metrics that mattered most to their particular business. By contrast, other Zynga competitors such as RockYou, initially focused on viral growth and grabbing as many users as possible by launching very simple casual gaming applications.

PlayFirst

A metrics driven culture was missing at PlayFirst. The company focused on developing and perfecting games that the team was passionate about. This often meant that it took longer to launch any particular game, and there was not a lot of data to help mold and shape those games. According to Mari Baker “we focus on a widespread analysis of our games – it can take some time for our games to launch…games really come to life if someone really advocates for it. Passionate people behind a game usually push games forward internally.” While metrics are important at PlayFirst, one can argue that passion for a game drives the launch of a game. This is the opposite at Zynga where retention metrics are the key indicators of success.

Broad Applicability of Game Design – Product-Market Fit

Zynga

Instead of focusing on niche gaming categories, such as first person shooters, RPGs, or games that focus on a particular demographic, Zynga made the conscious effort to focus their game development efforts on broadly appealing games. The primary motivator here was to cover as much of the casual gaming audience as possible and not be limited to any particular sub-group. According to Vish, “we wanted to appeal to the mass market, whereas other game development studios tend to be a little bit niche. This has allowed us to appeal to a very large audience, which encapsulates both genders [as opposed to some of our competitors].” This also fits well with their gradual and metrics driven roll-out strategy. By having a wide audience to target, they can obtain large installed bases at every step of the customer discover process. Understanding, their casual users, Zynga also focused on making their games very easy to understand and very fast to start playing. This helped with their engagement and retention metrics, as well as deliver on their promise of broad base appeal.

Playfirst

PlayFirst initially aimed their PC browser based games to untapped markets. “We saw a market that wasn’t being addressed. The ‘stay-at-home’ Mom didn’t have much to do in the house after she dropped off her kids so we aimed it at this market,” said Baker, CEO of PlayFirst. Per Christensen, arguably, PlayFirst was trying to create a new market disruption by creating a product catering market segment that is not being served by existing incumbents in the industry (e.g. games for stay-at-home Mom’s). In this effort, PlayFirst succeeded. It’s first hit, Diner Dash, has had over 550 million downloads which the company then followed up with a series of “everyday simulation” hit games that would resonate with their key audience such as Wedding Dash, Cooking Dash, and Chocolatier. However as the market began to evolve, PlayFirst found it pigeonholed in the games it was known for. PlayFirst continued to focus on its core competency and failed to expand the scope of games offered. “The team DNA made it really tough to change strategy as the team focused on what they were good at it,” said Janice Roberts, investor and Board member at PlayFirst (more on team DNA later). PlayFirst’s laser focus on a small demographic launched the company to success but the lack of appeal to a broader market as Zynga did, put a ceiling on the company’s growth.

The dilemma faced by Zynga and PlayFirst of whether to strive for a product-market fit with a horizontal market or a vertical market, is the classic problem that was encountered by Documentum. Jeff Miller and Documentum made a strong bet, that in order to cross the Chasm, his company needed to manically focus on one particular vertical. While this worked well in the enterprise model, in the consumer driven world of casual gaming it appears that the horizontal market approach taken by Zynga has won out. PlayFirst, by focusing on one vertical of casual gamers, has effectively shut itself off from the rest of the casual gaming market, whereas Zynga has broad base appeal, including attracting the same users that PlayFirst has specifically targeted.

Customer Discovery Process

Zynga

Although the time and cost to get to a minimally viable product has grown slightly for Zynga over time, it is still a fraction of what that time and cost is for traditional gaming studios such as Activision and EA. According to Vish, the company very much believes in the customer discovery process advocated by Steve Blank, and strives to be better at it with each new product launched.

Rapid iteration is central to their approach. Their goal is to launch as many games as they can, and to fail cheap and fast. The elements that allow them to achieve this rapid iteration and customer feedback process are: team metric-driven DNA, their distribution platform (Facebook), and focus on modularity around systems and scaling.

Team DNA: As was discussed in the first section because the company focuses so heavily on retention metrics, they know what information to look for when a new game launches, and are then able to act on that information.

Platform: Focusing on launching games on the Facebook platform, allows them to reach new groups of users, quickly, in order to gain the metric data they need. It also means that they do not need to worry about game distribution and can focus on game development. This is critical because a large component of their customer discovery process is to be able to launch several games and see which take off.

Modularity: Zynga has build scalable systems that isolate the operational and launch risks of new games, which minimizes the marginal cost of launching a new game. They employ a service-based approach to operations, and an open source approach to game development, both of which enable rapid iteration.

Playfirst

“We like to build high-quality games which takes us anywhere from 4 months to two years,” said Baker. PlayFirst generally ensures that games are fully-functional before they are released. Their initial distribution platform, PC browser, did not provide an opportunity for iteration. Players would download the games, play them, and not often provide feedback to PlayFirst. PlayFirst has a three-prong approach to launching new games:

Mining their back catalogue of games and updating them

Landscaping – examining what other developers are winning with consumers

Publishing – having third-party developers submit games

Although, this has worked for PlayFirst to a certain extent, they currently do not “own” their own customer discovery process. According to Blank, they do not adopt the lean startup principles. PlayFirst does not fail fast and cheap – rather, currently, follows greatest hits of other games. When asked if PlayFirst would ever release a game that is only based on a minimum viable product, i.e. something that was only arbitrarily, 40% finished, “we’d prefer not to do this. We really want to build a high-quality experience for the user and would want to release a game that we feel is fully functional,” said Baker. “Being one of the best matters and we just don’t want to crank stuff out.” This is a philosophical difference with Zynga who’s team DNA adopts the fail fast and cheap principle and iterates on a much faster basis.

“Our big mistake was not moving fast enough. The team DNA was so entrenched in the way we were doing things before, we didn’t pivot when we needed to,” said Roberts. The team should have not only pivoted in the offering of broader games but also should have pivoted when there were new distribution platforms. With the introduction on Facebook, PlayFirst acknowledged that this was a potentially powerful platform. The company started to offer games on the Facebook platform but pulled out of this strategy in late 2008 when the traction was not as expected. “There’s a difference between strategy and tactics and our strategy to pull out of Facebook was a big mistake,” said Baker. “We should have continued down that path with our strategy.” According to Roberts, the team wasn’t situated or flexible enough to try new platforms at that time. The management team felt comfortable in their niche, their platform and failed to really innovate and embrace the changes happening in the industry. This is in contrast to some of the cases we learned in class such at the Hulu case. Jason Kilar not only adopted the change in platforms and technology, but embraced it which has been one of the key success factors to Hulu. In fact, it was because of the innovations in technology (e.g. broadband) that Hulu was created. This can also be said with Reed Hastings of Netflix with the adoption of streaming, iPads, etc. offering a delightful experience to the consumer. The PlayFirst team was not able to cross the chasm (Moore) to the early majority, but the big question remains if the team in place really wanted to. Reading between the lines in our interviews, it could be argued that the initial founding team did not have the “DNA” to turn the company into a massive hit and hence the replacement of the CEO in 2009.

Zynga: Positioned To Be One Of the Biggest Homeruns of this Decade

While PlayFirst had a slight headstart, on Zynga, it is clear that Zynga is the dominant player in this space in terms of revenue and active and engaged user base. PlayFirst had the opportunity to become the dominant player that Zynga is today but failed to reach the early majority due to a flawed customer discovery process, a too narrow definition of their market, which led to a misalignment of the product-market fit, and their inability to engage their users, thereby identifying the appropriate metrics of success.

Zynga is rumored to plan for an IPO in 2012 and is grouped in with other prominent tech successes of this era like Facebook, Groupon, and Twitter. It has surpassed many formidable competitors in the casual social gaming space due to the company’s:

Focus on metrics, retention/engagement more specifically

Broad applicability of game design

Ability to rapidly iterate because of their team DNA, distribution platform, and modular systems and product design (Source: Lock, Stock, and Barrel)