作者：Dean Takahashi

Mark Pincus希望Zynga能够获得超过10亿的玩家。在过去五年时间里Facebook已经为Zynga创造了巨大的商机，但是从现在起Facebook将很难再为该公司争取到更多用户了。所以为了达到这一目标，Pincus便需要寄希望于公司移动高级主管David Ko的帮助。

Zynga一直都是稳步地扩展着，并也收购了一些手机游戏公司，如引起了一时轰动的《Draw Something》开发商商OMGPOP等。同时Zynga也开启了一个新的移动发行部门，从而为一些第三方游戏开发商提供手机游戏的发行服务。通过这种方法Zynga也能从中盈利——即使他们自己的设计师未能想出像《Darw Something》或《Words With Friends》等游戏的创意。

Ko相信如果Zynga能够创造出家喻户晓的手机游戏并以此创造自己的游戏品牌它便能够达到最终目标。在最近的GamesBeat 2012大会上他在媒体采访中讨论了相关内容：

david-ko(from venturebeat)

尽管GamesBeat才刚刚拉开序幕，但是我却明显察觉到许多人都认为手机开发者面临着各种挑战。你应该听过像“我们很难提高应用的曝光率，除非我们是Zynga。”“我们总是难以决定该面向哪个平台，除非我们是Zynga。”这种看法是对还是错？

我认为这是一种混合型业务。为此我们围绕着游戏发行创建了一个新的项目。就像我去年说的那样，我们已经获得了许多来自第三方开发商的咨询与关注，他们认为“这便是当前的应用开发领域存在的真正矛盾。利用现有的工具并与第三方公司合作而获得盈利比我们自己创造应用来得简单。相比早前，现在的我们更难获得曝光率，并且我们也很难找到合适的用户。Zynga或其它公司是否能够提供解决这些问题的方法？”

我想你应该注意到许多公司都在努力解决这一问题。但是这却是不容忽视的挑战；如今整个市场和生态圈都充斥着越来越激烈的竞争，每一天我们都能看到无数新应用的出现。多个平台每个月数十亿次应用下载量。所以我认为那些小型独立开发者更难让自己的应用突围。除非你拥有一个较大的网络以及能够用于交叉推广的较大玩家基础，否则这便是非常巨大的挑战。

对此你有何建议？基本上来说Zynga已经开始实践第三方手机应用的发行工作，不只是推广Zynga的产品，同时也提供其它应用的发行和推广服务。你所提供的建议与现在的App Store做法有何不同？

我们是从网站开始的。在今年的3月份我们开始在网页上发行游戏。如果你看今天Zynga的手机和网页平台，你会发现这里已经有大约3亿的月活跃用户以及6500万的日活跃用户。而之前我们也公开过手机领域的日活跃用户为2100万。

当我们开始考虑社交互动时，我们也注意到我们网站每天的社交互动已经超过4.5亿次。我们非常关注手机和网页中的第一方游戏，随后我们也发现这是有利于整个游戏生态圈的发展机遇。18个月前的我们还只是初涉移动领域。

虽然我们在18个月前才开始进入手机游戏领域，但今天已经获得一系列可观的数据。我们专注于第一方游戏，也将自己当成是今天最大的手机/社交游戏公司之一。而当我们面向第三方开发者开放之时，我们又该如何与这个生态圈共同发展？今天我们拥有一个高度专注于手机游戏的网站，并且我们也真心希望将它带向下一个层次。也就是我们不仅需要把握现在的2100万用户，我们还想要继续扩展更广泛的用户并向前发展。

你能否预见今后5年内的发展？如果移动领域继续发展的话它对Zynga又有何影响？对你们来说移动领域的哪种业务是Zynga的理想发展方向？

Mark已经明指出我们的愿景是通过游戏去连接世界。我们的目标便是获得10亿玩家。但是在现实中我们注意到了一些转变。我们发现大多数玩家都会说：“我们希望能够随时随地玩你们的游戏。”我们内部也在讨论，作为游戏公司，我们应该与各个平台最棒的内容开发者合作。所以我们便需要着重考虑“我们该如何在多个平台上发行我们的内容？”随后我们便可针对各个平台为用户量身打造出最佳游戏体验。

我觉得未来也会是一个转变。就从我的个人习惯来看吧。我不知道大多数人是怎样的情况，但是对于我来说我已经很少会使用笔记本电脑了（如果不是出于工作需要就更少去接触了）。甚至在一周的工作时间内我也很少用到它。出于工作需要我现在接触得更加频繁的是平板电脑——不论是边看电视边操作还是日常使用。除此之外我也会使用手机做任何事。尽管PC体验还存在着，但是平板电脑体验却极端快速地发展着。并且很显然如今的市场上已经涌现出了各种各样的手机产品。

Mark在今天早上提到最初将《FarmVille》转向手机平台时用户的失望反应。他曾经以为用户也希望能够在手机设备上体验他们之前玩过的游戏，但是结果却证明这并不是用户真正想要看到的。你们从中吸取了何种经验教训？

我发现很多人认为Mark是在说两年前并非我们进入手机游戏领域的成熟时机。但我要澄清的是，Mark所说的是指我们在2年前希望根据Zynga最大的一款游戏而开发一个大项目，也就等同于提供横跨手机和网页的游戏体验。对我们来说任何过程都是学习经验。我们也发现网页上的《FarmVille》每天都是根据一定的节奏而多次更新游戏内容。

2年前我们在某些应用架构中做得并不到位——尽管经历了像今天一样的更新和审核过程，但是在中间时期却会出现内容中断或延迟等情况，导致玩家不能获得最佳体验。而我们也从中吸取了足够的经验教训。基于服务器端vs客户端以及如何利用像HTML5等新技术我们真的获益良多。今天我们会根据不同玩家及其游戏习惯而定制新的游戏体验。所以我很庆幸我们在两年前的投入与学习，因为这一过程能够让我们在今天提供给玩家更棒的游戏体验。你们可以从《Word With Friends》以及《Draw Something》等游戏中看到我们的努力。

说到《Draw Something》，你们又从中吸取了何种教训？现在这款游戏的发展是怎样的，而你们又是如何计划它的未来？

我认为《Draw Something》对于我们来说就是《Words With Friends》一样的存在。我想将其称为文化现象。这是一款席卷全球的热门应用。现在我们的网络上已经出现了将100亿张画作，这一数字的确非常惊人。我们发现这款游戏具有很强的病毒性，能够传遍全世界。它的发展不仅是通过iOS，Android等平台，也与社交性密不可分。这是一款非常容易操作的游戏，玩家可以分享并连接它，并且它也需要多少本土化处理。全世界的玩家都可以玩这款游戏。从那时起我们便尝试着创造一款比之更加出色的游戏。

我们真心希望创造属于自己的手机游戏品牌。所以我们便想要拥有这款游戏并推动它的进一步发展；我们认为它可以成为我们旗下一个屹立不倒的游戏品牌。我们真的是以这种方式去考量我们的游戏资产。今天早些时候，Mark曾经谈到我们的游戏发行业务。而对于Zynga来说这只是开始。我们并不会发行了一款游戏后便将其置于一旁并宣告完成。当我们发行了一款游戏时它只是弧线的起点——我们希望这条长弧能够伴随着游戏的发展一直延伸。因为玩家总是希望感受到社交性。这也是我们今天开发任何游戏所遵循的基础。我们发现专注于社交性能够为游戏加分，就像Mark所提到的活跃的社交网站（ASN），并推出比单人玩家游戏生命周期更长的游戏。

《Darw Something》便拥有这样的长弧，它获得了爆炸性发展并在之后开始下滑。

这并不能代表全局。你所说的只是你在Facebook Connect中所看到的情况，只是根据一些数据点而做出的判断。而事实上是我们有一大部分用户并未使用Facebook Connect服务。我们不该忽略这部分玩家群体。用户也可以通过电子邮件或使用像Twitter等服务登录游戏。如此便说明我们很容易忽视使用其它游戏登录方法的用户。Facebook Connect及其使用只是我们考量的一个角度，但却不足以代表最终结果。

david-ko(from venturebeat)

你是如何看待游戏设计中的游戏病毒性？按照今天来看病毒性似乎已经深入用户的生活中，你可以随便找个人让他在Twiiter上发贴或在Facebook发送信息告知别人自己获得高分。但是这同时也是一种垃圾信息不是吗？你并不希望主次颠倒，所以你并不希望只是创造出这种垃圾。所以当你在思考游戏设计时你会让玩家如何与游戏进行互动？

问得好。说到互动，我们会严格考量每一名游戏设计师，直到他能最终进入IP过程并告诉我们某款游戏为何比市场上其它游戏更具有社交性，更加有趣或质量更优。今天的市场上已经有许多非常优秀的开发者，而我们正是通过社交元素以及游戏中的社交层面让自己脱颖而出。

就以我们刚刚发行的《Zynga Slots》为例来说吧。如今的市场中已经有许多老虎机游戏，所以当开发团队表示想要制作一款老虎机游戏时我们会考虑如何让这款游戏有别于市场中的其它同类游戏。并且我们也不止一次让整个开发团队重新创造游戏。所以他们最终能够带着一款真正具有创造性的游戏出现在我们面前——这是一款围绕着社交奖励，并以社交大厅为核心的游戏，将推动玩家邀请更多好友加入游戏。与《德州扑克》一样，如果有越多玩家同你一起游戏你的胜算也就越大。同时这款游戏还将其它游戏中的特色整合到其中并提供了更多不同的关卡。

我们注意到它比市场中其它老虎机游戏更具有社交性时，我们认为它的一大趣味性在于引入了《FarmVille》等游戏中的角色，而从加载时间表现来看，它也是一款高质量的游戏。可以说，我们至今已放弃了许多款游戏，只是因为许多人能够创造出比之更棒的游戏，而我们却不能创造出更具有社交性的游戏，所以我们便选择了抛弃游戏。但是当我们意识到可以通过创造出更棒的社交体验而凸显自己时，我们便看到了机遇。

你认为缺乏社交元素的手机游戏是否具有长远的未来？

是的，但是这种情况不会发生在我们的工作室中。在这个领域还有很多开发者能够创造单人游戏，这听起来很棒。而这也是我们为何推出发行项目的主要原因。在最初的发行项目中我们推出了5款游戏（游戏邦注：包括来自雅达利和Phosphor的游戏），而我们也都很欣慰地看到它们的发行。这些游戏与我们现在所提供的游戏有所不同。我们希望能够为玩家提供各种不同类型的游戏。我们意识到玩家想要玩各种不同的游戏，他们既希望玩像《Words With Friends》和《Draw Something》等游戏也希望挑战我们还未能提供的大型3D游戏或物理游戏。这也是我们为何决定展开发行合作的重要原因。

所以这便是这种跨界推广背后所蕴藏的原理？也就是我们将推动现有的传统游戏玩家去接纳新手机游戏或网页游戏。这是否就是Zynga的垮界机遇？尽管你占领了一个领域，但是你却可以在更广阔的领域中做你想做的事。

我想你只说到其中的一部分。“跨界”意味着存在于许多不同平台上的许多不同的事物，但对于我们来说却只是其中之一。就像我们会问自己“当整个应用生态圈变得越来越分散且竞争越来越激烈时，我们该如何发展游戏生态圈？”整个市场在近期只会变得越加分散。

Zynga中肯定有许多员工一整天致力开发手机游戏，但在下班回家后却会坐在Xbox 360前玩主机游戏。

的确是这样的。他们也会在办公室玩主机游戏，因为我们购买了好几台主机。如果你在今晚拜访我们的总部便能够看到相关场面。我们有许多员工都是主机游戏玩家，我们也鼓励员工去玩主机游戏——并希望借此激发他们的创造性。

对于近来的热门话题——Ouya，这个向承诺仅售99美元的游戏主机你有何看法？这种设备试图将玩家的手机游戏体验引向客厅，你是否认为它的出现将改变玩家的客厅游戏体验，它与手机有何不同？

我想这里存在着巨大的机遇。许多公司已经在追逐这一机遇了。甚至是苹果等公司也在琢磨着如何整合主机或电视。同时我也发现在平板电脑中存在着巨大的机遇。许多公司都在推动着平板电脑领域的发展，这是从PC平台的完美过度，就像我们在使用手机一样。同时不管是云计算还是转向Android平台并设置更多主机元素都是非常有趣的尝试。我想比起直接使用眼前的内容这种进化需要花费更多时间，但是这种投资却是值得的，因为这样你便能够根据我们现在拥有的设备去尝试各种应用。

你们想从第三方公司或独立开发商（他们也许只会质疑“Zynga是否真的能够发行我们的游戏”）身上获得什么？你希望他们如何评价自己的产品？

我希望这些公司都能够因为进入Zynga Network感到兴奋。在过去19个月中我一直在努力建造这个组织有序的手机游戏社交网站。当我最初接手这项工作时我希望能够延续我们在网页中所创造的“奇迹”。有许多玩家在我们的网页上玩游戏，并且几乎任何人都拥有自己的手机设备。所以我们希望明确如何将这些内容带到手机上。而现在我们需要面对的便是如何与这一生态圈一起发展？我们所公开的信息非常简单，即我们已经获得了一定的基础，所以我们希望开放业务，并将其它开发者融入其中。虽然今天也有许多其它网站在提供着同样的服务，但是我认为这对于开发者来说是件好事，因为只有拥有竞争者我们才能真正从玩家的角度去思考问题，并且我们也才能够真正以开发者为核心去创造游戏。如此我们将主要专注于创造一款优秀的游戏或构建一种有趣的体验，而将其它元素置于背景层面上。

60美元的电子游戏是否会完全消失？它们是否还有容身之处？

我仍然愿意为这些游戏花钱。我不确定它们是否会完全消失，但是现实是市场真的在逐步进化，并且正朝着多平台发展空间而发展，而这种进化也将不断加速并一直持续下去。有人说，今年就是手机年。但是很多人却不以为然，因为这种说法大约已经持续了5至10年。不过现在我们真的迎来了这一天。而我们仍需继续推动整个市场的发展，并促使它继续进化演变。（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 David Ko: Crossing over into mobile is the path to a billion gamers

Dean Takahashi

Mark Pincus wants Zynga to reach a billion players. Facebook has been good to Zynga over the past five years, but the social network is not going to give it that many users. To get there, he’s counting on David Ko, the social gaming company’s chief mobile officer.

Zynga has been steadily expanding, buying mobile game companies such as OMGPOP, the maker of onetime mobile sensation Draw Something. Zynga has also opened up a new mobile publishing division so it can publish mobile games made by third-party developers. That way, Zynga can cash in even if its own game designers aren’t the ones to come up with the next Draw Something or Words With Friends.

But ultimately, Ko believes that Zynga will hit its goals if it can establish brands with its mobile games that everyone knows and wants to play. Ko discussed this with Wired Game|Life editor Chris Kohler (pictured right) at our recent GamesBeat 2012 conference, where the theme was the Crossover Era: moving from one segment of the game market into another as a result of marketplace disruption. Here’s an edited transcript of the interview.

Chris Kohler:

There once was a company called Zynga.
Who did a quite interesting thing-a. Words With Friends popularity,
Caused Alec Baldwin hilarity.
If only he played Draw Something-a.

Ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to have a fireside chat about Zynga’s mobile business. Here’s David Ko!

David Ko: Hello!

Kohler: Fair or not, GamesBeat has only just begun. And yet I’m already getting a sense from a lot of the presentations here that there are a lot of challenges affecting mobile developers. You hear sentences like, “Of course it’s very difficult to get an app discovered…unless you’re Zynga.” “Of course it’s very difficult to decide what platform to put something on…unless you’re Zynga.” True? Untrue?

Ko: Well, I think it’s a mixture. We announced a new program around publishing to address that. We have been, for I would say the past year, getting lots of inquiries and focus from third-party developers saying, “There’s this real oxymoron in app development today. Through tools that are out there, and through third parties, it’s easier than ever to create apps in the marketplace. And there’s varying degrees of that. But it’s harder than ever to get discovered and to find the right audiences. Are there ways that companies like Zynga and others can help us do that?”

I do think you see a number of companies trying to address this. But I think it’s challenging; as the marketplace and the ecosystem has gotten more competitive, there’s tens of thousands of apps today that are getting submitted. There’s billions of apps now that are getting downloaded each month across multiple platforms. So I do think there’s a challenge there for smaller, independent developers to get their apps noticed. Unless you have a larger network, a larger player base to cross-promote from, it’s very challenging.

Kohler: So what is it that you propose? Because Zynga is essentially moving into this idea of third-party publishing for mobile apps: not simply promoting Zynga stuff, but taking other apps that are out there and leveraging what it is that you have to help them out. What is it you propose doing differently that’s not what Apple is doing with the App Store already?

Ko: For us, it really started with the network. We started publishing on the web in about March earlier this year. If you look at the combined network of mobile and web today on the Zynga Network, there’s about 300 million monthly users. There’s about 65 million daily active users, who we call DAUs. We’ve announced previously that there’s about 21 million on mobile, daily active users, on the average for the quarter. We like to see that as an average.

And then when we think about social interactions, on our network alone there’s over 450 million social interactions per day. So for a while, we were very focused on our own first-party games across mobile and web. Then we saw this opportunity to increase the overall ecosystem for games. Eighteen months ago, we were not that large in mobile. Many of you attended Mark Pincus’s earlier conversation. He talked about us being early [on Apple's iOS].

That was really 18 months ago, when we first started getting into the mobile gaming space. Today, I think our metrics speak for themselves. We focused on first-party gaming. We view ourselves as one of the largest mobile/social gaming companies that’s out there today. And then what we’ve said is, when we open it up to third-party developers, how do we grow that ecosystem together? We have a network today that’s highly focused on mobile games, and what we want to see is how we take that to the next level. Not really just taking the 21 million that we have today, but how do we grow that pot together?

Kohler: What do you see about five years in the future? As far as mobile goes, how important is it to Zynga? What part of the business is it, and what do you envision as the ideal future for you in the mobile space?

Ko: I think the vision Mark has been very clear on is that our vision is to connect the world through games. We have a mantra that we want to get to a billion players. The reality is that we’ve seen a shift. We’ve seen more of our players come and say, “We want to be able to play your games anytime and anywhere.” Internally, we’ve spoken about how we ultimately, as a company, need to work with the best content creators that are out there, regardless of platform. And so what we’ve done is focus on asking, “How do we focus on getting our content out there across multiple platforms?” And then we really give you experiences tailored to those platforms.

What I do see out there in the future is a shift. I only have to look at my personal habits today. I don’t know if this holds for the majority of you, but I use my personal laptop, if it’s not for work, a lot less. I barely use it during the week. I moved to more of a tablet-centric usage for my own purposes, whether it’s in front of the TV or whether it’s just day-to-day. And I’ve used my phone for almost everything. There will always be that PC experience, but there is the tablet experience that is growing really fast. And then, obviously, there’s the sheer number of mobile phones that are in the marketplace today.

Kohler: During the keynote earlier this morning, Mark mentioned the initial FarmVille move into mobile and how users were ultimately kind of disappointed with that experience. He’d imagined that they simply wanted to play the same game they were playing, just on their mobile device. And he found out, learned the lesson, that in that case that wasn’t in fact what they were looking for. What were the lessons of that process?

Ko: I’ve seen some people say that Mark said we were early to mobile about two years ago. That’s not the case. I’ll just clarify that. The fact that Mark was talking about was that two years ago, we took on an ambitious project with one of our largest franchises to create, I would say, the same type of game experience across mobile and web. Everything is part of a learning experience. What we tried to find was, on the web, with FarmVille, they had an update cadence of updating things multiple times per day.

The way we had architected some of our apps two years ago was that we had made them in a way that, with the updates and the approval processes that are out there today, things would break and lag in the in-between period. Players weren’t getting the best experiences. We’ve learned a lot since then. We’ve learned in terms of how we think server-side versus client-side and how to utilize new technologies like HTML 5. We’ve tailored new experiences for players today and their playing habits. So I’m glad that we made those investments and learned two years ago, because I think it’s made our experiences today that much better for players. You see it across things like Words With Friends, for example, Draw Something, and all the new games that we’ve come up with.

Kohler: Take, for example, Draw Something. What are the ongoing lessons from Draw Something? Where is that product now, and what are you planning on doing to push it in the future?

Ko: I think Draw Something, for us, has been similar to Words With Friends. I would say it’s a cultural phenomenon. It was one of those apps where it took the world by storm. We’re right now very close to our 10 billionth drawing on the network, which is just incredible. And in just this short amount of time. What we found was this game went viral; it went all over the world. And it grew, not only basically across iOS and Android and other platforms, it grew because of social. It was easy to play. You could share it and connect, and it was a game that required very little localization. People played it all over the world. Since that time,  we’ve tried to make the game a lot better.

What we’ve found is that we really want to create brands in mobile. We want to take this and extend it; we think it can become a brand that has an evergreen character to it. We’re really thinking about our portfolio in that manner. Earlier in the day, Mark talked about when we launch games. For Zynga, it’s really just the beginning. We don’t look at launching games, and then we put them to the side and say, hey, we’re done. When we launch games, this is really just the beginning of an arc, hopefully this long arc that we want to take with the game. Because you want to be social. Inherently, that is the foundation of all games that we build today. We’ve found that focusing on social can move scores like active social network (ASN) that Mark talked about and deliver games that are much longer in arc than, I would say, single-player games.

Kohler: Draw Something had this arc where it kind of exploded and then went down after that….

Ko: That doesn’t show the full picture. You referenced that by what you see in Facebook Connect, looking at those data points. The reality is, though, that there’s a huge subset of our users that don’t connect through Facebook. I would say that takes a portion into account. You can also log in through email and use things like your Twitter handle. So there are other ways you can log into the game that aren’t quite being captured. I think that while looking at things like that, Facebook Connect and usages, they’re a great way of seeing a certain perspective, but I think it only tells a piece of the overall story.

Kohler: How do you look at gaming virality in a game’s design? It’s got to go so far beyond, these days, just asking somebody, hey, tweet about this, hey, Facebook message about this high score you just got. At this point, it’s a lot of spam, right? You don’t want the tail wagging the dog. You don’t just want to create this. How do you continue to have people interact with the game when you think about your game design?

Ko: That’s a good question. You’re asking about social. We challenge every game designer, before it comes into what we call our IP process, to tell us why this game is more social or more fun or better quality than any other game in the marketplace. I think there’s a lot of great developers in the marketplace today, but we try to really differentiate ourselves through the social components and the social aspects of the game.

Let me give you an example. One of the games that we just launched was called Zynga Slots. There’s a lot of slots games in the marketplace today. So when the team came and said, hey, we want to build a slots game, there were natural reservations about, well, what’s going to differentiate this game versus every other game in the marketplace. And we made them go back to the drawing board a number of times. What ultimately they came back to us with was a really innovative game that you can go and download today, that centered around social jackpots, that centered around a social lobby, that really brought in your friends. The more friends that you play with, similar to Vegas, your potential winnings get hotter. It integrated things from other characters in other games to the games themselves that unlocked different levels.

When we looked at that game and noticed it was more social in nature than other slots games in the marketplace, and that was a big fun aspect that we saw, that it brought in other characters from FarmVille, for example, and that it was a high-quality game in terms of load time performance. So we start there. There’s so many games, I will tell you, that we shelve today, because there’s so many folks, even in this audience, that can build a better game and we can’t make it more social than what’s out there today. So we’ll scrap it. But when we feel we can differentiate ourselves through a more social experience, that’s where we see our opportunities.

Kohler: Do you think there’s a long-term future for mobile games that don’t have social elements?

Ko: Yeah, we do, but that’s not in our wheelhouse. I think there are lots of developers out there that can build single-player games, and that’s great. That’s why we also did our publishing program. We offered five games in our publishing program initially, whether it was by Atari or Phosphor, and I’m really excited to see some of those games come out. They’re very different from the games that we offer today. The fact of the matter is that we want to make different genres of games available for our players. We recognize that our players want to play a bunch of different games, they want to play games that are like Words With Friends and Draw Something, but they might also want to play heavy 3D kinds of games or physics-based games that we don’t offer today. We want to be able to offer those to them. That’s why we did our publishing partnerships.

Kohler: So is that the idea behind this crossover era? The concept here is, okay, we’ll have the established players in traditional games adapt to the new world of mobile devices or browser games. That’s Zynga’s crossover opportunity, then? You occupy this one space, but clearly there’s more that you could be doing.

Ko: Yeah, I think that’s part of it. “Crossover” could mean a bunch of different things on a bunch of different platforms, but that’s a piece for us. Asking, “How do we grow the gaming ecosystem together as the whole app ecosystem just gets more competitive and more fragmented?” It’s going to get more fragmented before it kind of contracts.

Kohler: There must be a lot of people who work at Zynga, working on mobile games all day, and they go home and sit in front of an Xbox 360 and play console games….

Ko: Absolutely. They play in the office. We’ve got consoles. You’ll see it, hopefully most of you will come to our event tonight at headquarters. There’s tons of console gamers all over the place. We encourage gameplay. We just want to unlock that creativity.

Kohler: What do you think about… The big news story that’s going around today while we’re all here is the startup company Ouya, with the Android-based 99-dollar App Store-style console. What do you think about stuff like that? Taking the mobile market that’s already working in order to shake up the way we play games and transporting that to the living room. Do you think that can change the living room, is it something fundamentally different from your phone?

Ko: I think there’s a huge opportunity there. You see many companies going after this already. Even Apple and others have looked at the market and asked, how can we integrate the console or the TV? I do think what you’ll find is there’s a big opportunity for all of us in tablets today as well. There’s a big push by many companies into the tablet area that’s kind of a nice transition from the PC, as you think about going to your phone. I do think that some of the announcements that we’re seeing, whether it’s about cloud computing or around taking stuff to Android and making it more of a console setup, I think those are all interesting. They’re going to take a little bit more time, I believe, to evolve than some of the things that are right in front of us, but I think that’s great, because it gives you more opportunities to play and use these apps that are on our devices today.

Kohler: What are you looking for from third parties or independent developers who are going to say, hey, maybe Zynga can publish my game? What are you hoping to hear from them about their products?

Ko: I want a lot of them to be excited about being on the Zynga Network. I’ve been there for 19 months now, just trying to build this highly curated mobile gaming social network. When I first came in I wanted to make sure we were able to leverage these amazing things that we had out on the web. We have so many people playing games out on the web, and everyone has a mobile device. We wanted to see how we could bring some of them to mobile, because they were telling us they wanted to play games on mobile. And now what we’re saying is, how do we grow this ecosystem together? The message that we’ve gone out with is pretty simple. We’ve got this base today, we’re open for business, we’d love for you to be a part of it. There are other networks out there today that are trying to do some of the same things, and I think that’s great for developers, because I think having competition or other folks that are trying to make the ecosystem easier for developers will challenge each of us to really think about it from your perspective. And that’s what I find exciting, because that’s going to push each of us to make it more developer-centric. It will make it so that we’re really focused on building a great game or building a great experience, and then all the other stuff, hopefully, we can help that just surface in the background.

Kohler: Is the $60 video game dead? Is there a place for that?

Ko: I’m still spending money on them. I don’t know if it’s dead, but the reality is that the market is evolving. It’s evolving to a place where you have to be somewhat multiplatform. It’s going to continue to evolve and accelerate. I think there was a saying for a while that, hey, it’s the year of mobile. And everyone used to snicker, because everyone talked about that for like five to ten years. But now that day has arrived. The reality is that now we’re going to continue to push on. So I actually think all of these markets are going to continue to evolve.（source:venturebeat）