作者：Steve Peterson

Zynga董事长兼首席执行官Mark Pincus鲜少接受采访，这是他目前最详尽的采访内容。下面主要围绕Zynga和游戏话题，以及Zynga所面临的机遇。（请点击此处阅读本系列第2部分）

据福布斯数据显示，Mark Pincus是美国第256大富豪，身价高达18亿美元。他是位连环创业者，在Zynga之前曾创建过若干技术公司。他拥有沃顿商学院经济学院的学士学位，以及哈佛商学院的MBA学位。

他于2007年携手他人共同创建了Zynga，伴随Facebook在那段时期内的迅猛发展，Zynga也获得迅速成长。Zynga目前的市值约是36亿美元；相比之下，EA投身行业30年后的市值也只有37亿美元。Zynga游戏目前有近2.5亿的月活跃用户（游戏邦注：包括Facebook、移动设备及Zynga.com平台）。Zynga于2011年12月16日上市；截止3月，公司股票价格升至每股14多美元，而目前的股价却已跌至5美元以下。

Zynga的迅猛发展让公司遭遇许多批评声音，同时也获得许多忠实玩家。公司遭受的批评包括，模仿他人作品，未能提高股票价格，投身下坡市场。Zynga继续引入新游戏，将市场扩展至移动平台，结果如何，且让我们静候公司下周即将公布的收益报告。

Mark Pincus from venturebeat.com

我们上周有幸在旧金山的GamesBeat会议采访了Mark Pincus，就在他宣布大会正式开始之后。

我参加了Zynga Unleashed大会，在我意识到大会演讲并非瞄准投资者后，Zynga的股票出现小幅下跌。

我在大厅遇到来自Lazard和Baird的两位分析师，他们表示，令他们感到有趣的是，与会分析师都非常乐观，没有参加会议的分析师则持消极态度。

有些分析师表示，Zynga的股票下跌是由于Facebook的糟糕表现。你觉得这是部分原因吗？

这并非我锁定的主要参数。我们主要瞄准的是我在台上谈及的内容。我主要思考如何创建一个可扩展、可重复的庞大市场，如何将数亿用户带入游戏中，将内容变得具有社交性，留住用户，促进用户进行转换，推进交叉推广，创造新类型内容。这是我的主要参照标准，这是我认为有趣的地方及未来1-3年将有利于投资者的内容。我不认为花时间阅读分析报告及试着弄清为什么他人不喜欢我们的股票是最有价值的事情。

我积极服务于当前股民和未来投资者。我希望投资者觉得，Zynga是项不错的投资，最佳投资选择是这些新兴发展类型，及西方市场的免费模式游戏和社交游戏。我对于这一未来满怀信心，投资者需要决定他们是否认同我对于所有这些内容的乐观态度。若他们也持积极态度，那么他们就需要决定我们是否是他们的最佳投资选择。

社交游戏也许已达到稳定水平；据comScore表示，Facebook在美国的访问量在过去几个月持平稳状态。我们是否达到“Facebook高峰”，若是如此，这对Zynga来说意味着什么？

我想你多半听到过Facebook谈及这一话题。这里存在大数定律：星球上只有这么多人类，美国只有这么多人口，所以当所有用户都注册Facebook，我们很难看到显著的新用户增长。我认为未来的市场机会主要存在于推动新的体验机会，促使游戏更具社交性的新型游戏机制（游戏邦注：这是最有效的发展驱动因素），以及植入更多存在于硬核游戏和MMO游戏多年的游戏机制。

未来5年我们面临的部分机遇在于，如何包装这些内容，确保它们配合小屏幕、小范围注意广度的形状因素，以及不会阅读指南的用户，同时确保内容准入门槛要低且又不乏深度。我认为这一机遇将持续创新——这是种新型创新。

这不会达到带来下个“公会”的程度，这更多涉及将类似公会的东西打造成非公会的元素，这就像是个你妈妈能够参加的茶话会。各公司可以通过许多不同方式把握这里的游戏机会；我们想要变成用户和大众市场。所以我们对于能够联系用户的游戏非常感兴趣，而非分割彼此的狭隘游戏。

通常你们的游戏都覆盖相当广泛的用户群体，你们着眼于能够带来尽可能多用户的游戏和题材。这是否依然是你们的目标，或者在你看来，瞄准狭隘群体的游戏题材是否存在发展机会？

二者都存在机会。我认为免费模式存在巨大发展空间。通过免费模式，我们降低门槛，这里的首要障碍是掏钱，第二个障碍是实体性，无论这是下载内容，还是盒装游戏，但这是我的个人观点。我认为行业最大的机会在于促使诸如我之类的玩家体验游戏。我是个潜在玩家；之所以是潜在的是因为我太忙了，我腾不出时间。但若你能够将游戏放到我目前，将游戏提炼成5分钟内就能吸引我的内容，我能够同朋友和他人共同体验，那么我就会进行体验。内容需要形式简单，回合简短，时间跨度较长。

CityVille from aingames.com

我认为有种心理状态蕴藏着新的大众市场机会——在此网络中，你可以获得像我侄子之类的玩家，他们是《光晕3》到《魔兽世界》的忠实玩家，但他们也玩《CityVille》。同时在此网络中，你获取我妈妈、Michael Arrington（游戏邦注：TechCrunch的前任编辑）之类的玩家，我锁定年长群体和忙碌人士。过去他们认为游戏枯燥乏味，如今他们也开始体验内容。你知道吗？他们手中有足够资金。这对他们来说算不上什么。我猜想，对Alec Baldwin来说，在游戏中花钱完全没什么大不了。我认为自己并没有传达出正确观念，这主要源自于大家对于游戏行业的既有看法，但我对此的看法和电子商务相同。我将此看作是网页或移动平台机会。

在我看来，这降低了游戏的准入门槛，将此变成全民体验，我觉得除引进新市场外，它还带来各种网络效应，将游戏变得更有趣。所有人都在玩游戏，这简直棒极了。这变成一个文化话题，就像是所有人都在观看和讨论《权力的游戏》，这令《权力的游戏》变成文化内容，而非仅是电视节目。这是我所着迷的文化基因，这是我们作为一家公司所追求的东西。

Zynga.com之所以能够取得当前成绩是因为平台带来基于游戏的串联沟通。基于你的社交网络制作游戏的理念能够带来庞大用户基础。

这是个沙盒效应。我们将Zynga.com视作我们网络的前端，在此我们能够立即尝试所有内容，快速向前迈进，更快进行创新。所以团队因首次能够接触到这些网络层面的机制而颇受启发。在Unleashed大会上，团队展示头碰头的多人同步体验，我们将此作为能够插入街机游戏，而非仅是《泡泡射击》的小部件。这是若干能够让所有玩家进行头碰头游戏的代码行。

我们非常注重社交游戏的深度。这并非众多游戏体验的部分要素；这是我们所追求的目标。我们通过zFriends机制的尝试只是触及皮毛，我们积极尝试各种不同方式，旨在让你逐步积累有趣的个人资料。这可以是基本信息，方便其他人了解你——他们也许是并不清楚你游戏角色的好友。这些游戏存在许多促进更好了解彼此的方式（游戏邦注：如《卡坦岛》）。它们赋予我们另一种表达方式。

作为游戏设计师和社交游戏设计师，我们的部分职责有点像是万圣节派对或是化妆舞会，我们给予你许多服装选择，这些服装试穿起来很方便，能够让你展现自己的个性，这样你就能够遇到他人，玩得很开心。我觉得这是不同于纯粹社交互动和纯粹游戏的心理状态，因为我们以能够将自己融入其中或进行比较的方式融汇二者——但这并非我们追求的文化基因。

你基于不同传统模式的视角看待这一问题。从某种程度上说，你所遇到的问题是其他尝试推广另类内容的人士也会遇到的问题；这很难进行解释，因为你无法说“这就像是X更胜一筹”。

是的，你通过产品经验发现这点。我认为，你的最佳品牌，最佳营销方案和最佳PR活动是你的产品体验。如果你在此把握得当，那么任何接触你产品的人士就能够明白。他们把握体验的本质，你所要表达的内容。我认为这比盒子背面的内容或是你在Unleashed所做的宣传重要。

好友所说的，而非发行商所说的才是关键。

我经常开玩笑说，只有普通女大学生愿意在自己的涂鸦墙上谈论你的产品，或是飞机乘客将注意力转向邻座人员，你才算是成功。只有获得口头传播你才算是表现不俗。这是个很棒的流通方式，因为它不会说谎。要正确把握非常困难，但若做到这点，将非常具有爆发力。我们已亲眼目睹这一情况。但在此文化层面有所突破的游戏作品通常无法轻易重复，但它们是行业的未来。我并不将此看做是脱离常规或是一次性现象。

我将列举另一有助于理解的类推分析。我看着电视，我也是潜在的电视观众。我对电视有潜在瘾性，但这鲜少出现，只有在我着迷于电视的情况下。我着迷于这些场景表演。我着迷于《Lost》，着迷于《Breaking Bad》和《权力的游戏》，我想要寻找新节目，当我看到最后一集内容时，我有些沮丧，就像读完一本优秀的作品一样。事实上，就去年夏天我们给自己安排的《Breaking Bad》内容来看，我只让我的朋友每天观看一集，我每天计算还剩多少天，这着实非常沮丧。现在我非常着迷于《The Newsroom》。所有剧情都有若干能够重复的线索，有特定公式，但并非简单的重复。若这完全公式化，你定不会喜欢其中内容。《Breaking Bad》内容新颖，完全出乎意料，充满惊喜和趣味。若有人制作粗糙的翻版《Breaking Bad》，你定不会喜欢它们。

但我觉得这是可重复内容。由于这些连续剧，我对于电视的未来持乐观态度；若这些剧集没有出现，我则就不这么认为。《Breaking Bad》将我带回电视。同样，我觉得我们刚刚进入社交游戏时代。要有类似的经历——我像着迷于《Breaking Bad》那般着迷于《CityVille》，我记得1年前的圣诞节，我在《CityVille》游戏中度过节日。我和家人呆在科罗拉多，我总是想，我要利用孩子们小睡的时间，我得回家，我得腾出1个小时，因为我想玩《CityVille》。当我完成内容时，我感到有些沮丧。我希望再次进行体验。我认为它将能够再次激起我的兴趣。

你所说的内容让我回想起有些作曲家曾说过的，优秀音乐就是秩序和混乱之间的完美平衡；若你融入过多秩序，内容就会非常枯燥，若你融入过多混乱，内容就会令人厌恶。

是的，所以其中包含熟悉、可预测的元素，同时也有悬念。我觉得自己的内心真正着迷于游戏，我希望自己的决定能够起到关键性作用。我希望做出有意义的决策，我希望自己在做出优秀决策时能够收获即时满足感，它们带来长久的更有利位置。这主要就游戏方面而言；有关社交方面，我希望自己的体验方式，所做的决策能够让我同他人共享情感。通常这就是开怀大笑。（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 Interview: Mark Pincus In Depth

By Steve Peterson

Part one of a rare conversation with the man behind the #1 social gaming company

The Chairman and CEO of Zynga, Mark Pincus, rarely grants interviews. After months of trying, GamesIndustry International was finally able to sit down with Pincus for an extended interview; one of the longest he’s ever given in fact. What followed is a wide-ranging discussion about Zynga and games, and where Pincus sees the opportunities for Zynga.

Mark Pincus is, according to Forbes, the 256th wealthiest individual in the United States, with a net worth in the neighborhood of $1.8 billion. He’s a serial entrepreneur, having founded several other technology companies before Zynga. He has a B.S. in Economics from Wharton, and his MBA from Harvard Business School.

Zynga, the company he co-founded five years ago in 2007, has grown rapidly along with the tremendous growth of Facebook over that time period. Zynga’s market capitalization right now is about $3.6 billion; by comparison, Electronic Arts’ market cap is at $3.7 billion after nearly 30 years in business. Zynga currently has nearly 250 million monthly active users of its games, which appear on Facebook, mobile devices and their Zynga.com website. Zynga went public on December 16, 2011; its stock price climbed over $14 per share by March, only to drop down to less than $5 per share today.

Zynga’s explosive growth has left it with plenty of critics as well as millions of players. The company has been criticized for copying games, not keeping its stock price up, and being in a declining market. Zynga continues to introduce new games and expand its reach on mobile devices, and just how well this has been succeeding we will find out when their latest earnings report is released next week.

GamesIndustry International sat down with Mark Pincus at the GamesBeat conference in San Francisco last week, right after his appearance on stage to launch the conference.

Q: I was at Zynga Unleashed, and while I realize that presentation wasn’t aimed at investors Zynga’s stock took a dip afterwards…

Mark Pincus: I just ran into two analysts from Lazard and Baird in the hall and they said that what they thought was funny was that the analysts who were there were really positive, and they said the analysts who weren’t there were really negative.

Q: Some analysts have been saying that Zynga’s stock decline has been due to Facebook’s poor performance. Do you think that’s part of what’s going on?

Mark Pincus: It’s not in my main frame of reference. What I spend my time on is what I talked about on stage. I’m thinking about how do we build a large, scalable, repeatable market, and how do we bring hundreds of millions of people into gaming, make it really social, keep them there, move buyer conversion, move across platforms, new categories. That’s my frame of reference and what I think is interesting, and what I think will serve investors in one year or two years or three years. I don’t think that spending my time reading analyst reports and trying to figure out why somebody didn’t like our stock is the best use of my time.

I’m trying to serve current shareholders and future shareholders. I’ve always wanted investors to feel like Zynga was a good deal and the best way for them to invest in these growth categories, in free-to-play gaming and social gaming in the West. I’m a bigger optimist about this future, and I think investors have to decide whether they agree with my optimistic outlook on the future for all of this or not. Then if they do, they need to decide whether or not we represent the best company for them to pursue that with.

Q: Social gaming may be plateauing; Facebook’s visits in the US have leveled off in the last few months according to comScore. Have we reached “peak Facebook,” and if so what does that mean for Zynga?

Mark Pincus: I think you’ve heard Facebook talk about this as well. There is a law of large numbers, as in: There’s only so many people on the planet, there’s only so many people in America, and so when they’re all on Facebook it’s hard to be showing big exciting new user growth numbers. I think that the market opportunity going forward is more about driving new play opportunities, new game mechanics that make games either more social, which we think is the best growth driver, but also have more game mechanics that…have been proven out in core gaming and MMOs for so many years.

Part of the opportunity for all of us over the next five years is how do we package those up in a way that can fit in this form factor [Pincus points to smartphone] of a very small screen, small attention span, and someone who’s not going to read instructions, not going to do tutorials, and it’s got to have a very, very light, soft on-ramp but have a lot of depth of where that experience can go. I think the opportunity is to continue to innovate – it’s a new kind of innovation.

I don’t think it’s as much that you invent the next ‘what’s after guilds?’, but I think it’s more how do you take something like guilds and make that something that isn’t called guilds, that’s more like a tea party that your mom can get into. There are so many different ways for companies to go after delivering on the game opportunity; we want to be consumer and mass-market. So we’re fundamentally interested in games that bring people together, not games that are narrow and divide each other.

Q: In general your games seem to reach a pretty wide demographic, and you’ve looked for games and even for genres and execute them in ways to bring in the biggest possible audience. Is that still your goal, or do you think there may be opportunities in games that are more narrowly focused?

Mark Pincus: There’s opportunity in both. I think there’s just great opportunities opening up in free-to-play in general. I think all free-to-play… as we lower the barriers, and the number one barrier is spending money, and the number 2 is the physical, whether it’s a download or a package, but beyond that I’m coming at this from this personal bent. I fundamentally believe that the biggest opportunity is to get people like me to play. I’m a latent gamer; it’s there, it’s just in the background because I’m too busy, and I can’t find the time, I can’t justify the time. But if you could get it in front of me and you could distill it down to something that I could get into in five minutes, and I could play it with friends and other people, you would have me. It’s gotta be short-form, short session, long arc.

I think that there’s a mentality around me that I fundamentally believe represents a really interesting new mass-market opportunity – in that net you could capture gamers like my nephews, they’re gamers, from Halo 3 to World of Warcraft, but they played CityVille. Also in that net you can capture my mother, you can capture Michael Arrington [former editor of TechCrunch], and I’m turned on by all the people who are too grown up to play, who are too busy to play. They saw games as nerdy and dorky, and now they’re playing. And you know what? They have a lot of money they could spend if they wanted to. It’s nothing for them. It’s not a lot for Alec Baldwin to spend money in a game, I would guess. I don’t think I’ve communicated this right, and it gets distilled within existing paradigms of how people look at the game industry, but I look at this the way someone might have looked at e-commerce on the web. I look at this as a web or a mobile opportunity.

To me it’s lowering the barriers to play, opening this so wide that it’s an everyone experience, and I think that that, in addition to bringing in a new market, I think it has all kinds of network effects that make the game fundamentally more interesting. It’s cool when everyone’s playing a game. It becomes a cultural topic, like when everybody is watching Game of Thrones and talking about it, it makes Game of Thrones cultural content, not just TV content. That’s this kind of cultural meme that I’m excited about, and that’s what we’re pursuing as a company.

Q: Zynga.com does that more because it can hold persistent threaded conversations around games. The idea of taking your social network and building games around it could build a larger audience.

Mark Pincus: It’s a sandbox. We look at Zynga.com as this holistic front-end to our network, where we can try everything at once, and move really quickly, innovate faster. So the team is really inspired by being able to, for the first time, turn on some of these network-level mechanics. At Unleashed the team showed off head-to-head play, the multiplayer, live synchronous play that we built as a widget that we can plug into an arcade game, not just Bubble Safari. That is a couple lines of code that could let anybody turn on head-to-head play.

We’re really into how deep you can go with the social gaming experience. It’s not part of a lot of experiences; that’s all we ever want to be. We think we’ve just scratched the surface with zFriends and all the different ways that we can start to let you accumulate an interesting profile over time. That could be icebreakers, ways for other people to get to know you – they might be your friends who didn’t know your gamer persona. There’s so many ways, like in Settlers of Catan, in these games that we actually get to know each other better. They give us another form of expression.

Part of our job as game designers and social game designers, it’s kind of like a Halloween party or a masquerade party, and we’ve got to give you lots of costume options that are easy for you to try on and let you express your personality, so that you can meet other people and have fun. I think it’s just a different mentality than either someone who’s just about social networking or just about gaming, because – and I know we cross over both in ways that could pull us into those camps or get compared to those – but that’s not this meme that we’re passionately pursuing.

Q: You’re approaching it from a different direction than those traditional modes. In a way you have the problem that anyone faces when you’re trying to market a product that’s not like other things; it’s difficult to explain because you can’t say “it’s just like X only better.”

Mark Pincus: Right, you kind of discover it through the product experience. I’ve always believed that your best branding, your best marketing, your best PR is your product experience. If you do that right, anyone who touches your product gets it. They get the essence of the experience, what you’re about. I think that matters more than what’s on the back of the box or what you promoted at your Unleashed event or whatever.

Q: It’s what your friend says about it that matters, not what the publisher says.

Mark Pincus: I’ve always joked that you’re only as good as what some user fill-in-the-blank college girl who wants to say about your product on her wall post, or someone on the plane turning to the next person. We’re only as good as our word-of-mouth. It’s a great currency, because it doesn’t lie. It’s very hard to get it right, but when you do, it can be really explosive. We’ve seen it. When I look at the games that have broken through on that cultural level, they’ve become word-of-mouth phenomena, they’re not easily repeatable, but I do think they’re shots across the bow that point to the future. I don’t see them as aberrations or one-offs.

I’ll give you one other analogy that’s useful. I look at TV and I am a latent TV watcher too. I have a latent addiction to TV, and it’s seldom filled, but when it is I get obsessed with it. I get obsessed with these episodic shows. I was obsessed with Lost, I was obsessed with Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, and I want to find that new show and I’m really kind of sad, like finishing a great book, when I get to the last episode. In fact, with Breaking Bad we rationed ourselves last summer, and I would only let my friends watch one episode a day, and I was counting how many days we had left, and it was really sad. Now I’m really into The Newsroom. There is some repeatable, but not easy, thread to all those shows, a certain formula to all those shows. If it’s formulaic you won’t like it. Breaking Bad was fresh, it was unexpected, it was surprise and delight. If somebody made a bad copy of Breaking Bad you wouldn’t be excited. It’s hard.

But I think that is a repeatable thing. I’m optimistic about TV’s future because of those shows; before those shows I wasn’t. Breaking Bad brought me back to TV. Similarly, I think we’re just entering that kind of era with social gaming. I think once somebody has that experience – I was addicted to CityVille the way I was addicted to Breaking Bad, to the point that, I remember a year ago Christmas, planning my day around my CityVille play experience. I was in Colorado with my family, and I was thinking, OK, I need time between the kid’s nap at this time, I get home this time, I gotta break out an hour, probably an hour, because I gotta go and play CityVille. When I reached the point I was done with it, I was kind of sad to move on. I want that again. I believe it’s possible to scratch that itch for me again.

Q: You can’t exactly figure out how to bottle the lightning, but you can look to generate it more often. Is that what you’re looking for?

Mark Pincus: Yeah.

Q: What you said reminded me of what some composer once said, that good music is a balance between order and chaos; if you have too much order it’s boring, if you have too much chaos it’s ugly.

Mark Pincus: Yes. So there’s familiar, predictable, but there’s also the twist. I think fundamentally that what’s inside me really getting into a game, I want to feel like my decisions matter. I want to feel like I’m making meaningful decisions, and I want to get immediate gratification if I’m making good decisions, and they lead to some long-term better place. That’s kind of on the game side; on the social side, I want to feel like the way I’m playing, the decisions I’m making, give me the chance to share some emotion with somebody. Usually it’s a laugh.（Source：gamesindustry）