作者：Rob Fahey

Zynga IPO仅过去6个月，该公司就迎来了首次备受瞩目的失败。

Zynga的IPO之梦现在正迅速演变成一场恶梦——该公司股票售价并未如愿以偿地成为受到热捧的香饽饽，许多批评Zynga的声音也不时涌现。尽管Zynga股票在今年开春表现尚可，但并未取得实质上的飙升，而即便是这种中等级别的成功也已经足以称得上是Zynga股东和管理层的美好年代——要知道Zynga市值最近数周已严重缩水，以致纳斯达克甚至不得不暂时中止其股票发售，这对一家上市仅6个月的公司来说确实颇令人尴尬。

zynga(from mashable.com)

Zynga究竟是怎么了？这个社交/免费增值游戏领域的宠儿为何会如此迅速地失势？对此问题业内有多种不同版本的答案，有些解释似乎颇为可信。有人称Zynga在股市表现不济原因在于，许多无法在公开市场获得Facebook股票的投资者只好转向Zynga股票，希望以这种曲线方式从中分得一杯羹。而Facebook上市后的表现却并不如预期那般理想，Zynga股票则成了多余之物——投资者们此时抛售手Zynga股票似乎成了一种必然选择。

这当然是一个原因，Facebook表现差强人意的IPO只是Zynga股票下跌的催化剂，但并非根本原因。要找到问题的根源，我们必须先查看Zynga的两大最根本问题，因为这可以让我们了解对每个电子游戏公司几乎都会造成消极影响的情况。

首先，人们最广泛讨论的一个问题就是Zynga从网页到移动设备平台的转型。这种转型也是当前科技领域的关键内容之一，但这并不是说网络时代正走向终结——毫无疑问，我们当然还会长期通过笔记本或台式电脑玩游戏，使用社交服务及软件，但人们对移动设备的使用率正大幅增长，智能手机和平板电脑是一个发展潜力巨大的新市场，他们也能提供网页平台所创造的功能。

而Zynga主要是一个网络公司，更重要的是，它主要是一个Facebook应用公司。它的运营项目主要是《FarmVille》等Facebook游戏，并通过病毒营销渠道扩散影响力，利用交叉推广功能将现有玩家引向其他Zynga游戏。而Facebook关闭多个病毒传播渠道后，行业中的许多公司只能眼看着Zynga已攀升到Facebook生态圈的顶端，而自己却无从下手，因为可助社交游戏公司称霸Facebook的大门已经关闭，Zynga能够稳踞Facebook游戏宝座在一定程度上得益于天时地利。

但这一幕似乎不会在移动设备平台上演了。Zynga在移动领域艰难发展，而Facebook也似乎面临同样的窘境——它的主要威胁并非Google+等来自网络平台的产品，而是奉行移动平台优先的社交网络，后者正致力于从Facebook手中抢夺用户注意力及粘性。Facebook和Zynga在应对这一问题上采取了相似的策略——都投入大笔资金收购在这一领域表现良好的公司。例如Facebook斥资10亿美元将移动平台的照片分享服务Instagram收入囊中，而Zynga则抛出2亿美元收购《Draw Something》开发商OMGPOP。

尽管两者都在这一领域砸下重金，但它们都未能通过这些收购而推出富有竞争力的移动端运营项目。Facebook的核心手机应用仍然很糟糕，而在收购Instagram数天之后就发布的Facebook Camera应用基本上只是复制了Instagram功能，并不足以证明Facebook在移动领域的竞争力。而才被收购后不久的《Draw Something》人气已开始急剧下滑，并且Zynga看起来也似乎无法推出一款成功的原创手机游戏。

Zynga–OMGPOP((from article.wn.com)

第二个原因目前还没有被行业广泛了解——有可能是因为它让一部分投资者和评论员相当沮丧。这个原因就是，股市及Zynga本身可能根本不了解Zynga究竟是个什么公司。他们只看到社交圈及免费增值模式的强大力量，但却忘了Zynga实际上还是一个电子游戏公司，他们也忘了这种公司的运营方式。

电子游戏公司与其他媒体形式的公司（游戏邦注：例如电影制作公司、书籍出版商，唱片公司）并无本质区别，都要求公司拥有能够创收的后备商品，但要靠推出新产品而实现发展。这种公司必须有一个新产品发布计划，其中至少要包含一些能够成为热作的产品，这才能推动利润增长，让公司看起来正处于健康发展状态。优质的后备商品能够为公司年收益增添乐观数据，但如果你没有推出新的热作，那么再强大的后备商品也会变得无足轻重——当发展更为健康的竞争对手出现后，它们就可能沦为廉价商品。

Zynga也不例外，但它认为自己能够幸免于此，并且也有一些投资者持有同样看法。Zynga是一个游戏公司，所以它能否保证后备商品的健康和繁荣发展，这一点至关重要 ，但如果它想获得发展，它就必须再创造热作。《FarmVille》属于后备商品，它就是Zynga能够引以为傲的一项荣誉。但Zynga与其他多许传媒公司一样，其未来产品发布计划只是尚能获利而已。Zynga及其投资者认为社交圈和免费增值模式可以改变现实，但现实却让他们感到失望。如果你的业务就是制作游戏，那么无论你采用的是哪种运营模式，都要遵从一个现实——你得发布更多采用这种模式的新游戏，而新游戏必须符合或超过市场预期以及之前游戏作品的质量，否则你的业务就是在缩水。而从移动领域以及让Zynga备受指责的运营措施来看，Zynga尚无力做到这一点。股市已经看出了这个问题，因此试图摆脱这种局面。

这是一个严重的教训，因为Zynga并非唯一存在运营思维问题的公司。这个市场上还有其他持有一些热作的公司也相信，得益于社交游戏新运营模式的兴起，他们可以永远依靠手头的热作而持续发展。他们似乎忘了无论自己当前的荣誉有多闪耀，传媒公司永远没有一劳永逸的时候。这也能够解释为何“昙花一现”是这个行业鄙视的词汇，许多今天无限风光的公司为何数年后就陷入沉寂。

Zynga是这些公司的一个典型。你的公司若仍需要以制作游戏为生，而如果你无法实现预期目标，你就会失败。对Zynga而言，他们走出目前窘境的唯一出路就是制作一些真正令人兴奋，高端而极具吸引力的新游戏——并且最好把这些游戏投向移动平台。但不幸的是，在我看来，Zynga公司可能并不存在这种基因，社交游戏市场不久之后可能就会遭遇第一次真正的劫难。（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 Falls Back to Earth

By Rob Fahey

Only six months since its IPO, Zynga risks being social gaming’s first high-profile failure

ZyngaZynga’s IPO dream is rapidly turning into a nightmare. Admittedly, it hardly started out as the sweetest of dreams – the company’s share price didn’t deliver the expected “pop” in its early days on the NASDAQ stock market last December, which led to plenty of criticism of the firm. Although it did make modest gains this spring, it’s never exactly been a stock that soared – but even such modest success must seem like halcyon days to Zynga’s investors and management team now. So severe has the collapse of Zynga’s valuation in recent weeks been that the NASDAQ had to step in to halt short-selling of shares in the company – a humiliating step for a company which only listed six months ago.
What has happened? How could the darling of the social and free-to-play gaming scene have fallen so far, and so fast? A variety of answers have been proposed, some of them more plausible than others. Some explain Zynga’s awful performance in purely stock trading terms – ZNGA shares were being used as a proxy for Facebook shares by investors who wanted to have money in FB but couldn’t buy shares on the open market yet. With Facebook shares now launched, and not doing terribly well as yet, Zynga’s listing is surplus to requirements – investors have withdrawn their holdings and put the stock into free-fall as a consequence.

“With Facebook shares now launched, Zynga’s listing is surplus to requirements – investors have withdrawn their holdings and put the stock into free-fall”

That’s almost certainly a factor, but it’s not the primary reason for Zynga’s problems. Facebook’s somewhat underwhelming IPO was a catalyst for Zynga’s decline, but not a root cause. For the root causes, we have to look at two much more fundamental problems with Zynga – problems which are extremely important to understand, because they give us an insight into serious issues which will impact on almost every business in the video games market at some point down the line.

Firstly, and perhaps most widely discussed up to this point, there is the question of Zynga’s transition between the web and the mobile device. This transition is one of the most fundamentally important things that’s happening in technology right now. It’s not that the web is going away – we’re going to continue engaging with games, social services and software through laptop and desktop computers for a very long time, no doubt. However, the bulk of the growth in engagement is coming from people on mobile devices. Smartphone and tablet devices are an enormous growth market, and they’re both generating a new market and cannibalising functions which would traditionally have been seen as web functions.

Zynga, though, is primarily a web company. More than that; despite its best efforts, it’s primarily a Facebook company. It built its business around titles like Farmville (which at its peak enjoyed almost 100 million people logging in every day), spreading their influence through viral marketing channels, many of which Facebook has since disabled, and through cross-game promotions that drove existing users of one Zynga game across to another one. The shutting down of the viral channels Zynga used to grow so rapidly has led many in the industry to view Zynga as having scrambled up the ladder just before it broke; their path to dominance of the Facebook ecosystem no longer exists, and cannot be followed. They were in the right place, at the right time.

The same thing does not, however, seem to be true of mobile devices. Zynga has struggled on mobile – as, in fact, has Facebook, whose primary threat right now comes not from rivals on the web like Google+, but from the threat of a mobile-first social network emerging which takes users’ attention and engagement from Facebook. Both Facebook and Zynga have pursued similar strategies in attempting to overcome this problem – they’ve whipped out their wallets and paid huge sums of money for companies who do mobile right. Facebook dropped a cool billion dollars on mobile-based photo sharing service Instagram, while Zynga’s immense and seemingly ill-advised investment in Draw Something is likely to become the stuff of industry legend.

For all the cash they’ve spent, neither company seems to have been able to find the acquisition with just the right blend of magic pixie dust that can turn them into competent, mobile-first operations. Facebook’s core mobile application is still inexcusably dreadful, and the company’s launch of a “Facebook Camera” application which bluntly copies Instagram’s functionality only days after the Instragram acquisition was announced didn’t do much to convince anyone of the firm’s competence in this field either. Zynga, meanwhile, has watched Draw Something’s popularity decline sharply and still seems to lack the competencies required to launch a successful mobile property of its own.

The games industry is used to there being casualties from platform transitions, but few are quite as dramatic as this. It’s hard to characterise Zynga’s behaviour as anything other than panic-buying. The company is terrified of mobile – a platform where it won’t enjoy the dominance it did on Facebook, where Apple (in particular) expressly forbids many of the exploitative viral techniques it used to build that dominance in the first place, and where smaller, more nimble developers seem to be building empires while Zynga tries to figure out what the hell to do next. Throwing money at some of those developers is a better strategy than complete inaction, but it’s not a winning strategy in the long-term – and the markets know it.
“Zynga is terrified of mobile – a platform where it won’t enjoy the dominance it did on Facebook”

The second thing the markets know, or are beginning to realise, is a little less openly discussed right now – perhaps because it makes a fair few investors and commentators look rather bad. That second thing is this: both the stock markets, and Zynga itself, completely misunderstood what kind of company Zynga is. In their excitement over things like the social graph and the undeniable power of free-to-play business models, they forgot that Zynga is still, essentially, a video game company – and they forgot how that kind of company operates.

Video game companies are no different to any other kind of media company – a film studio, a book publisher, a record label. You have a back catalogue that generates some revenue, but your growth has to come from new releases. You’re relying on a schedule of new releases to generate at least a few break-out hits which will drive your profits and keep your company looking healthy. A good back catalogue evens out your annual revenue figures, but if you don’t make hits, then the strength of your back catalogue is irrelevant – except as a bargaining chip when the time comes to sell out to a healthier rival.

Zynga is no different – but it thought it was, and some investors believed it. Zynga is a games company. It’s important for it to keep its back catalogue healthy and thriving, but ultimately, if it wants to grow, it has to generate hits. Farmville is back catalogue – a comfortable set of laurels to rest on, and nothing other. Zynga, like any other media company, is only as good as its last release, and only as bankable as the strength of its forward release schedule. There is a sense that the company and its investors thought that the social graph and F2P business could change that reality, but they were utterly deluded in this. If your business is making games, then no matter which business model you use to monetise those games, the reality is this – you have to be prepared to release new games down the line, and those new games have to match or exceed the market performance and quality of your previous titles, or you’re a shrinking business. Zynga, for whatever reason (we could return to the mobile question here, or look a bit more closely at some of the less palatable business practices of which Zynga stands accused), doesn’t seem to be capable of that. The stock market sees the problem, and wants out.

“Both the stock markets, and Zynga itself, completely misunderstood what kind of company Zynga is. They forgot that Zynga is still a video game company – and they forgot how that kind of company operates.”

This is a hugely important lesson, because Zynga is not alone in having this kind of flaw to its business thinking. There are plenty of other companies out there which have had a couple of hits and which seem to believe, thanks to the new business models enabled by social gaming, that those hits can sustain them almost indefinitely. They’ve forgotten that media businesses can never, ever rest on their laurels, no matter how impressive the laurels may be. There’s a reason why “one-hit wonder” is a term uttered with a sneer – and plenty of businesses that look exciting today are likely to find themselves slapped with that term in a few years time, I suspect.
Zynga is a stark example to those businesses. You’re still in the business of making games, and if you can’t meet the expectations of that business, you’re going to fail. For Zynga, the only route out of their current predicament is to start producing some genuinely exciting, high profile and appealing new games – preferably games which lead on the mobile platforms. My suspicion, sadly, is that neither of those things is in the company’s DNA. Social gaming may see its first truly high-profile casualty before long. （source:gamesindustry）