社交网站Facebook年仅26岁的创办者Mark Zuckerberg并不在乎钱。但这样一个不在乎金钱的人却十分擅长从其合作伙伴身上榨取金钱。在过去两年的发展中，Facebook不再仅仅是一个社交网站，它成为了最大的网络聚集地，每个月有多达2亿用户在该网站上进行各种社交游戏。

位于旧金山的Zynga公司是Facebook最大的游戏开发商。该公司擅长软件开发，今年Zynga公司旗下FarmVille、Mafia Wars之类的游戏虚拟商品盈利预计超过5亿美元。实际上，上述的这些游戏都是无需付费的，但如果想要在游戏中领先一步，玩家可以支付少量现金购买一些虚拟商品。

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然而，Facebook公司十分精明，他们运用各种方法向Zynga这类依靠其平台的游戏公司施加压力，从而获取他们的部分收入。据外界估计，今年Facebook将通过向各游戏开发商施压，促进自身收益突破15亿美元。

对此，Facebook表示他们并没有榨取游戏开发商的利润，而是将这些钱用在改良运行平台，创造更宜人的网络环境。对此，Facebook公司的公共交流政策副董事Elliot Schrage表示，“在外人看来，我们想尽一切办法赚钱，但实际上那些钱主要都投入到了网络系统的建设管理中。我们相信Facebook是网络行业中对待游戏开发商最为友好的公司之一。”

Facebook的盈利方式

Facebook从开发商身上赚取的第一笔利润主要来自于广告。对Zynga等游戏公司而言，吸引新玩家最有效的方式就是在Facebook上刊登大量的广告。因此，只要Zynga从玩家身上获利，利润的一部分马上就会因为购买广告空间而转向了Facebook。这样一来，Zynga公司不仅是Facebook网站的主要游戏开发公司，同时也是Facebook最大的营收来源。

此外，Facebook还强制要求游戏开发商在其各款游戏中使用Facebook专用的虚拟货币Facebook Credit。从此，玩家不再是直接向游戏开发商购买虚拟商品，而是购买Facebook Credit。这样一来，Facebook可以从虚拟商品交易中抽取30%的利润份额。

Inside Network的创办者Justin Smith指出，今年底大部分的Facebook应用都会开始使用统一的Facebook Credits，这将为Facebook新增3亿美元的年收入。同时Smith还估计明年用户的Facebook社交游戏消费大约为10亿美元。

显然，游戏开发商并不愿意放弃30%的收益，但他们又能怎么样呢？对此，Smith评价道，“他们在Facebook网站上经营生意就不得不适应Facebook的一切变化。这就是依靠平台存活的规则。”

但是，现在的社交游戏行业早不是2004年Zuckerberg在哈佛宿舍创办Facebook时所能想象的了。自2007年5月，Facebook宣布将对外界开发商开放，允许在Facebook网站上运营外界应用以来，社交游戏行业发生了巨大的变化。如果没走这一步，Facebook不会由社交网站转变为平台，这一切就好比90年代的微软Windows。

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Facebook的这个决策在硅谷掀起了一场“淘金热”。大约100多万名开发商总共开发了55万款应用。其中，Zynga公司的创办者Mark Pincus牢牢抓住了这一机遇。在此之前，Pincus早已在硅谷成立了一系列科技公司，同时他也是Facebook的早期投资者。在Facebook公布其新平台的前几个月，即2007年1月，Mark Pincus创建了Zynga。同年9月，Zynga发布了自己的首款Facebook游戏Texas Hold’Em Poker，从其，Zynga公司的事业开始腾飞。

随着Zynga公司的繁荣发展，Facebook也开始对其施加压力。今年初，Facebook网站开始禁止Zynga等社交游戏公司通过发送免费通知的游戏宣传行为。这项新政策首先造福了那些已经受够了游戏广告连环轰炸的玩家，同时也造福了Facebook。由于免费广告的取消，Zynga等公司不得不花费更多的钱用于购买Facebook广告空间。

此后，另一个挑战紧随而来。Facebook引进了Facebook Credit，并要求所有合作的游戏开发商必须统一使用这款虚拟货币。这一事件引起了Zynga和Facebook的关系紧张。但在今年5月后，经过一番讨价还价，Zynga和Facebook这两家公司还是达成了一份5年合作协议，协议中Zynga同意使用Facebook Credits。

然而事实是，Zynga毫无选择的余地。TechCrunch的编辑Michael Arrington认为Facebook令游戏开发商陷入了“达斯·维德的死亡之手”，

因此，在与Facebook协商长期合作条款的同时，Zynga也开始向多样化发展：减少对Facebook网站的依赖；与雅虎和谷歌达成协议，将在这两个平台上公布Zynga游戏；同时更有谣传Zynga将开发自己的社交游戏网站。

在某次发言中，Zynga公司表示，每天有上百万人在Facebook社交网站上玩zynga公司的游戏，他们希望继续与Facebook合作，为全世界的游戏玩家带去更多好玩的社交游戏。

也许Zynga公司永远都无法完全脱离Facebook，但如果可以在其他地方得到充分的发展，Zynga起码可以在谈判时争取更多有利的条款。（本文由游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译）

Part of the lore around Facebook is that Mark Zuckerberg, its 26-year-old founder, does not care about money. But for a guy who doesn’t care about money he is awfully good at squeezing it out of his business partners. Over the past two years, Facebook has evolved from a social-networking site into something much bigger: it has become a huge online arcade where each month more than 200 million people play videogames that run as applications on top of Facebook.

San Francisco–based Zynga, the biggest Facebook game developer, has become a software powerhouse in its own right, generating an estimated $500 million in revenue this year by selling virtual goods to people hooked on its games, which include FarmVille and Mafia Wars. (Zynga won’t comment on revenue projections.) There’s no cost to play the games, but if you want to jump ahead faster, you can spend real money on virtual goods.

But Facebook has been finding clever, albeit arm-twisting ways to wring revenue out of the software companies like Zynga that live in its ecosystem. That arm-twisting is partly how Facebook this year will manage to generate revenues approaching $1.5 billion, according to outside estimates.

Facebook, for its part, says it’s not trying to squeeze money out of developers but rather to defray the cost of operating the platform and make it better for everyone. “What may look to outsiders as efforts to monetize our platform are in fact efforts to build a robust and sustainable ecosystem,” says Elliot Schrage, vice president of communications and public policy at Facebook. “We believe we have one of the most developer-friendly platforms on the Internet.”

The first way Facebook makes money from partners is through advertising. The best way for companies like Zynga to attract new game players is to advertise heavily on Facebook. So as soon as Zynga rakes in money from its users, it turns around and pumps some of that money back into Facebook to buy ad space. As a result, Zynga is not only a leading developer of games on Facebook, it’s also one of Facebook’s biggest single sources of revenue.

Facebook squeezes yet more money from Zynga and other partners by getting them to accept payments from game players using an online currency that Facebook has created, called Facebook Credits. Instead of buying virtual goods directly from game developers, players buy Facebook Credits—and Facebook keeps a 30 percent slice of the transaction.

By the end of this year most of the big apps will be using Facebook Credits, says Justin Smith, founder of Inside Network, a research firm that tracks the Facebook ecosystem. That could generate $300 million in new annual revenues for Facebook, since users by next year will be spending about $1 billion on social gaming on Facebook, Smith reckons.

Game developers surely do not like having to give up 30 percent of their revenue, but what choice do they have? “They’ve built their businesses on Facebook, and they have to live with changes that Facebook makes. That’s part of life on any platform,” Smith says.

Social gaming is not something Zuckerberg could have imagined back when he was creating Facebook in his Harvard dorm room in 2004. The change began in May 2007, when Facebook announced it would let outside developers create applications that run on top of Facebook. With that move, Facebook transformed itself from a Web site into a platform, something akin to what Microsoft Windows was in the 1990s.
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That move by Facebook set off a gold rush in Silicon Valley, drawing more than 1 million developers who have created more than 550,000 apps. Nobody seized the opportunity more eagerly than Mark Pincus, the founder of Zynga. Pincus had already started a string of tech companies in Silicon Valley and was an early investor in Facebook. He founded Zynga in January 2007, a few months before Facebook announced its new platform. In September of 2007, Zynga released its first Facebook game, Texas Hold ’Em Poker, and business quickly took off.

As soon as Zynga began to boom, Facebook began to put on the squeeze. Earlier this year Facebook stopped letting apps makers like Zynga promote their games by sending notifications to users. The new policy was great for users, who were sick of being bombarded with promos about games. It was also great for Facebook, because by depriving game makers of their free promos, it pushed them to spend more on buying advertising space from Facebook.

The next and bigger challenge came when Facebook introduced Facebook Credits and indicated it would eventually require all partners to use them. That move led to tension between Zynga and Facebook. But this past May, after some haggling, the two companies struck a five-year deal in which Zynga agreed to use Facebook Credits.

The fact is, Zynga had no choice. TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington claimed Facebook had developers in a “Darth Vader death grip,” and described the situation between Facebook and game makers this way: “Imagine a 400-pound bully strangling another kid while simultaneously rummaging through his pockets for lunch money. And he’s speaking quite calmly the whole time about what great friends they still are.”

In the months since striking the long-term pact with Facebook, Zynga has begun trying to diversify its business and reduce its dependency on Facebook. It has completed deals with Yahoo and Google to put Zynga games on those platforms, and has been rumored to be developing its own social-games network.

In a statement, Zynga says that “millions of people play Zynga games on the Facebook platform every day. We look forward to continuing to work with Facebook to bring the best social game experiences to users worldwide.”

Zynga will likely never get away from Facebook completely. But if it builds enough presence elsewhere, it can at least demand better terms from the 400-pound bully. And that may be good enough.（Source：Newsweek）