The downslide in its stock price has not changed the fact that Zynga has quite a corporate machine in place. It is still there.
Inside Zynga and the making of its next hit, ChefVille
a mix of folks with vast experience in gaming, going back to the glory days of Activision..... there are a lot of moving parts at Zynga .... what a fine-oiled machine the company is ..... the team working on ChefVille was passionate about food ..... the game can make everyone “better cooks.” .... a senior designer who wanted to do a “Next Gen” food game to follow up Zynga’s “Cafe World.” .... all Zynga games are tested with pods of people, each focused on a specific aspect of the title. Those pods are comprised of artists, writers and engineers ... the external focus groups that really lets the team know what people dislike before they ship something into the wild .... Zynga’s development process is so iterative, that the company is really making a “big complex toy.” By bringing in both hardcore and novice game players, the ChefVille team was able to pick apart what they were building and make sure that it hit all of its goals for engagement. ..... We let people play with it and sit back and watch. We build the next level of features based on feedback. We have ideas internally, but community matters. ..... The team that I sat down with has built games on literally every platform known to man. ..... With this new social element, a gaming studio now has a unique connection with the player. Games run 24/7 and are constantly being updated and tweaked ..... Zynga knows whether it has a hit within minutes of shipping the game. ..... Zynga travels to other cities to pull together groups of players for testing purposes .... Instead of worrying about whether a game can scale, Zynga teams can focus on making the game absolutely awesome, monetization ready and full of social hooks. ..... the moment of launching a game is when the work really gets started for a company like Zynga. ..... The company also makes sure to pay attention to all channels for feedback, including Twitter and its own support site. ..... you can’t say that Zynga doesn’t have a platform which is extremely powerful to launch games from. ..... The engagement levels on ChefVille are so deep that my jaw dropped a few times. There are always things running in the background, everything on the screen is clickable. ..... The level of detail and connectedness for ChefVille is unlike I’ve ever seen on any game
