Zynga's Mobile Woes

It is like you spent your prime learning Newton's theory of gravity, then someone, or something, comes along and says you need to be learning the Theory Of Relativity. That is how mobile is. I guess "getting" mobile is not easy.

Has Zynga Faced A Paradigm Shift?
Zynga: Could It Reinvent Itself?
Zynga Recipe
Zynga Morale
Zynga And Mobile
Zynga Fixes
Zynga Getting Hammered

Behind Mark Pincus's Bid to Save Zynga

Mr. Campbell, a technology veteran who has coached Silicon Valley CEOs such as Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt, had been called in by Zynga investor and venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers to advise Mr. Pincus as the social games company's stock plunged and some of its online games lost traction. Some Kleiner Perkins partners warned Mr. Campbell that he might not make much progress. .......... Pincus was open to advice. Mr. Pincus "was discouraged" ...... He "felt terrible about what was happening; he felt the turmoil." ...... The 46-year-old CEO has remained outwardly positive while Zynga's troubles have played out publicly over the past few months. ..... He was grappling with internal strife, including executive defections and confrontations with employees. ....... the CEO, who owns 50.2% of Zynga's voting control and has previously worked with outside consultants to improve his management skills, is trying to remake himself as its leader by ceding more control to deputies and improving communications. ...... "rapid change in player habits and social technologies have dictated fundamental changes at Zynga. And when businesses change, it's inevitable that some people will choose to leave." ...... Mr. Gordon said Zynga had failed to prioritize mobile development and found that its online games didn't easily translate to smartphones' smaller screens. "Mobile turned out to be more different than anyone expected, in terms of monetization and also user experience" ........ In May, at an off-site meeting in Monterey, Calif., with 100 senior employees, one group led by product director Jonathan Liu confronted Mr. Pincus over morale. Mr. Liu said he told Mr. Pincus that Zynga needed a clear strategic vision. ...... Mr. Liu, who added that he was "almost yelling" at Mr. Pincus at the meeting. .... and reorganized the mobile division so that it was integrated into every gaming studio and not a stand-alone unit. He also pushed harder into new businesses, like real-money gambling. ..... also filled his calendar with product meetings ..... switched his main phone from a BlackBerry to iPhone ..... Employee departures became rote ...... When Zynga notified employees of their extra equity, many received just several hundred options spread across a multiyear vesting schedule, while others got a larger amount. Some employees asked if they could refuse the grant, which they viewed as an insult and a pittance ...... Pincus has focused on improving his communication skills ........ "Project Whistle," a program to connect top executives with Zynga employees. The group has run more than 30 meetings over the last two months where executives discuss Zynga's strategy and answer questions from the crowd. ..... delegation skills. Mr. Pincus has been known for dominating discussions and focusing on details such as the font choice or color scheme of games

Zynga's CEO Almost Broke Down In Tears Over Company's Downfall

employees berating him about the company's lack of a strategic vision and poorly thought-out schemes to boost morale

Now David Ko Is Essentially Running Zynga

David Ko, an executive who has championed Zynga's push into mobile and transformation of its Facebook-oriented franchises like FarmVille and Mafia Wars into multiplatform gaming experiences that cross both Web and mobile, has gotten another promotion in the process...... the troubled maker of social games shuffles management every few months, as it tries to adapt the company to a rapidly changing world where mobile rules..... Ko's been a key part of that transformation, pushing Zynga to buy Newtoy, the maker of Words With Friends, and OMGPOP, the maker of Draw Something...... Ko now oversees Zynga's strategic planning, international expansion, and infrastructure........ Ko also has oversight for all of Zynga's game development, with Zynga's top game-development executive, Steve Chiang, reporting to him. Chiang and Ko had previously shared oversight for Zynga's studios, with both reporting to Pincus. ..... Steve Chiang is now Zynga's president of games, overseeing all studios and reporting to Ko

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Zynga Fixes

Mobile is a trend, it is a tsunami, and it is not new, it has been going on. So the thought that Zynga should place a major emphasis on mobile is to state the obvious. Mobile is going to be the central computing experience for most people. They are out and about but they are connected, they are online. Mobile is where the center of gravity is headed, if it is not there already. And that has implications for numerous companies, many industries.

Being metrics driven is important. But being only metrics driven can feel empty. Creating games is artwork. You can't get rid of the metrics, but you can't be a slave to the metrics either. What makes for a great actor? A great director? A great movie? What makes for a great game?

There's A Major Flaw In Zynga's Plan To Fix Itself

It has no choice but to figure out mobile. Zynga's mobile users are growing three times faster than its web users. ...... Farmville, which first put the gaming company on the map, has led to a slew of other "ville" attempts, like Castleville, Cityville, YoVille, PetVille and FishVille. Most have not been able to attract the same user-base as Farmville. .... "The 'With Friends' network is the same strategy as ville games," says the source "Pick a franchise that has one hit and double down on the franchise as each game performs worse and worse."

Going mobile is as much a strategy as going online is. That is a broad direction. Then you have to figure it out.

Wall Street is even more metrics driven than Zynga. Way more. It looks at cold, hard cash, earnings.

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Have Started Playing CityVille

I am a pretty accomplished farmer at Farmville on Facebook. But then I have not been active in months. I have played Angry Birds on Google+. But today I decided to play CityVille on the Google+ platform. It is fun.

I had managed to never spend a dime on Farmville. Cityville cost me 10 bucks on the first day. I am like, I can't wait, let's go get some energy. That was five bucks. Before you know I had put down another five bucks for a few thousand coins.

The Zynga business model works.

I am in mind to go back to growing my city only organically, as they say in tech startup world. Act lean.

I see me spending a few minutes every day to slowly build my city.

Farmville Farmer's Market: My Idea
Played Farmville After Long Months
Farmville Has Not Been Loading For Me
Farmville's Got Competition

Mark Pincus Is Really Something

(Article first published as Mark Pincus is Really Something on Technorati.)

Image by Joi via FlickrMark Pincus stands out. He really does. He does not fit the stereotype. The guy is responsible for one of the fastest growing companies in history, but his past is littered with all sorts of entrepreneurial failures. To the seasoned eye, those failures were the stepping stones to his grand success, but only in December 2009 he was being pilloried by some small name journalist to whom Pincus pleaded on the air: "We go way back."

He did not drop out of college. He was not 19 or 23 when he started Zynga. He is not 20s young. He is not the most photogenic entrepreneur out there. His public appearances tend to be littered with all sorts of horror stories of him having had to deal with venture capitalists and other creatures of the tech ocean. John Doerr's firm rejected him several times, and Zynga has been better for John Doerr than Google has. Now why would John Doerr do that? I think there is a cultural bias against people who are not the most photogenic.

The New York Times Is Bullish On Twitter

Image via CrunchBaseThe New York Times is Twitter's new best friend. I have cultivated a new habit. Now when I see a link to a New York Times article even on the New York Times website itself, I copy the subject line and feed it into the Twitter search engine. Twitter has never failed me so far. There is always some soul out there, usually a whole bunch of souls, that have tweeted out that particular New York Times article. It is called crowdsourcing the need and desire to not pay the New York Times a dime.

Me In The New York Times

Facebook Getting Smarter With Social Ads

Image via CrunchBaseFacebook's Ad Space Is Different

Inside Facebook: Facebook Launches Three New Sponsored Stories Types For Pages, Apps, And Websites: turns user activity into ads shown to their friends ..... expand the kinds of user activity that can be converted into ads to include Page post Likes, app or game usage, and activity on third-party sites ...... powerful way for apps to grow their user count without disturbing game play with prompts to share or invite friends

I can see Zynga jumping all over this. Used to be Zynga could flood your streams with Farmville related stuff. I saw some of my Facebook friends ask, where is the button to turn this thing off? Now Zynga
Image via CrunchBasewill have a smarter way to get in. And Facebook will make money. This is like Google only charging you if people click on your ads. This model forces the Facebook advertisers to engage users. No engagement, no ad displays. This is smart.

Played Farmville After Long Months

Image via CrunchBaseI think it has been almost a year. I stopped after the game started acting funny. It simply would not load for me. Anu Shukla could not understand. She thought maybe my blogging stole me from Farmville. My conspiracy theory was that Mark Pincus was personally punishing me for having taken credit for an idea.

I tried the game on a Mac at an Apple store. Last year. Still not loading. Was that a Flash/Apple thing? I don't know.

Anyways, my Chrome Notebook did not arrive, and recently I bought myself a new computer, a PC, after having tried a Mac for a few weeks: I liked it. But if all you need is a browser almost all the time, the PC works just fine. And costs matter. Sam Walton is my hero.

Farmville's Got Competition

Image by haikugirlOz via Flickr

ReadWriteWeb: Look Out Farmville: Angry Birds is Coming to Facebook: The game - in which you fling a variety of birds at things in hopes of knocking them over - is a complete blockbuster with more than 75 million downloads. Several different gaming blogs have reported that Angry Birds' creator, Rovio, has told Wired UK that it is working on a social reinvention of the game for Facebook...... Will Angry Birds take over as the number one game on Facebook? Can it compete with the crack-like qualities of games like Farmville and Cityville?

I'd be curious to know as to how the game reinvents itself for the Facebook platform. I do think they are capable of giving Farmville some serious competition.

Zynga: The Google Of Games?

Image via CrunchBase

That is common practice. To use a well known entity as a metaphor. At an event I attended during Internet Week, an entrepreneur on the panel said, "We are the Netflix for fashion." You don't buy dresses, you rent them. (Women In Tech-Media Event At JP Morgan: Internet Week) That is a great way to describe your company. If your company is not very well known, it makes sense to use a well known company as a metaphor. I'd love to be able to say about this blog, we are the Zynga of blogging (we are not, I am not), because Zynga, let's face it, is a well known name and it is huge. At the layperson level people probably are more familiar with the Farmville name than Zynga, but Zynga is big. So you have to ask, what's going on here?

New York Times: Will Zynga Become the Google of Games?

Mark Pincus, Zynga’s 44-year-old founder....... he had set out to build an enduring Internet icon, one that was synonymous with fun. ..... There has to be more than “a garage sale, a bookstore, a search engine and a portal ...... the opportunity to build an online entertainment empire was “like search before Google came along.” ..... the hottest start-up to emerge from Silicon Valley since Twitter and, before that, Facebook ...... While Facebook needed four and a half years to reach 100 million users, Zynga crossed that mark after just two and a half years. ....... the games are free to everyone ...... has been profitable since shortly after its founding. ...... investors, including Google and the Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, have put about $520 million into the company ...... Zynga has been valued at more than $4.5 billion ..... Silicon Valley’s next billionaire .... “He has nailed the next killer app, the next compelling thing that’s going to happen” in media. ...... Six million Facebook users, who grew tired of constant updates about their friends’ games, joined a group called “I don’t care about your farm, or your fish, or your park, or your mafia!!!” ...... Facebook started restricting the messages, and Zynga’s traffic dropped sharply. ..... little effect on revenue because many players who dropped out didn’t buy virtual goods. ..... about four times larger than its nearest rival, Electronic Arts. Playdom is third ...... Pincus is something of an aging whiz kid. ..... A serial entrepreneur, he sold his first company, Freeloader, an early Internet broadcast service, for $38 million, and took public his second, a business software maker called Support.com. ........ talks of building a “digital skyscraper” ..... a visionary leader. ..... also known for his sharp elbows and irreverent style ..... brags about being fired from a consulting firm job for having little patience with his bosses. ...... “I didn’t believe in paying dues” ...... open about his distrust of many venture capitalists ...... a Silicon Valley firm turned down an investment in Zynga, telling him he was “not coachable.” ......"I did every horrible thing in the book to just get revenues right away." ...... “As the company has had more exposure and visibility, I have had to realize that more people take what I say seriously” ..... Twenty to 30 percent of visits to Facebook are to play games .... When Mr. Pincus first envisioned Zynga, most investors and peers doubted that a gaming start-up could become the next big thing. .....“Zynga has the most revenue, growth and happy customers of any three-year-old venture we’ve ever backed,” says John Doerr

Farmville was the next big thing because Farmville offered Facebook users that Facebook itself did not. Sitting down to catch up or talk serious topics can be socializing, but you can't do that all the time. That is why people play board games.

And traditional video games were missing a big point: the Internet. There was email before Hotmail, but they all missed a big point: the Internet.

There were other online games, but many of them were solitary exercises. To Farmville social is fundamental. Social has been as big a trend as search, and Zynga respected that.

And there has been the interactivity part. Playing Farmville is a very different experience from blogging. It is very different from taking pictures and sharing.

Free might not count for innovation, but it is. It is a big one. What if you did not have to download anything to play Second Life? What if it had been free? Keeping the game free has been fundamental to Farmville's growth.

There has been a monetization fit. Yahoo did display ads, fine. But Google could not have done that. Ads on Google had to act like search results to make sense. Similarly Farmville monetization had to be part of the gaming experience. There has been a great fit.

Pincus is not 22. Zuckerberg is not the norm in entrepreneurship. Most - the vast majority of - entrepreneurs are closer in age to Pincus than to Zuckerberg although the media will have you believe otherwise. I think Mark Pincus' age is an important detail in this story.

Pincus has had a track record of giving the finger. Out of the box thinking requires that. Bloomberg got fired too. And so he went ahead and started a company. Got to do something. What are you going to do with all that nervous energy?

Gaming as a basic fabric of the web experience, wow.

Every human activity ever, if you can figure out a way to take it online, there is a business model for that.

And there is room for reinvention. Believe it or not, Geocities was my first blogging platform. It was simple enough. But then platforms like Blogger came along and blogging took off. Geocities was a community before Facebook was a community. Facebook did not invent community, it reinvented it.

Farmville is a reinvention of gaming. The question to ask is, can Zynga re-reinvent gaming? Will it still be hot five years from now? Google is still around and fairly hot. Android and Chrome alone make it pretty cutting edge, I think.

Farmville Farmer's Market: My Idea
Farmville Has Not Been Loading For Me

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Farmville Has Not Been Loading For Me

Over a week back I called Steve Jobs a Pied Piper. (The iPad Is No Laptop Killer) My farmville game has not been loading since. Did Steve Jobs get someone to mess with my Flash?

I got started with Farmville in December. I was reading about it a lot. Finally I gave in. Obviously I started the poorest farmer in my neighborhood. Soon I was the richest. I was hooked to the game. I entered the fray out of business curiosity, and I ended up really appreciating some of the social aspects of the game.

I Just Became Friends With Anu Shukla
Anu Shukla Has Found The New Frontier In Advertising

Then not long back a friend of mine who I did not know had more points than me befriended me and now he was the richest farmer in my neighborhood. I was working hard to win back my title, and that is when the Pied Piper episode happened.

I tried the usual remedies like uninstalling and reinstalling Flash. No effect whatsoever.

I am thinking perhaps I attained Farmville nirvana somewhere along the way, and there is nothing more left to do for me at Farmville. That is an explanation I could live with.

In the mean time I have focused my energies on blogging and actively commenting at other people's blogs. That also feels like farming.

Farmville Farmer's Market: My Idea

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Farmville Farmer's Market: My Idea

A few days back the image above started showing up when I loaded Farmville for me. And I am like, yes! I suggested this directly to Mark Pincus. He said he liked the idea, but that was a while back. Looks like finally he has gotten around to doing it.

I came to Farmville late. I have not been much of a gamer. But Farmville was talked about so much in the blogosphere. And the TechCrunch dude Mike Arrington had just given the game quite a beating. Some of my friends were on the game. What had most got me interested was there were reports Farmville was using the Facebook platform to beat Facebook itself in the monetization game. That piqued my interest. It also helped that I grew up in a farming family. Have you watched the milking of the cow/buffalo - by hand - the milk that you drank an hour later? I have.

So I got onto the game and was hooked. So hooked I went on to become the richest farmer in my neighborhood, bought a million dollar villa, and so on.

My Facebook Photo Album: Farmville

Note, Anu Shukla is one of my neighbors. She just might be my very best neighbor. And, by now, she has the most beautiful farm in my entire neighborhood. She has really taken to farming these past few weeks. There is something to be said of people who sell their companies for hundreds of millions of dollars. When they take to farming, they really take to farming.

Anu Shukla Has Found The New Frontier In Advertising
I Just Became Friends With Anu Shukla

I have said several times in Fred Wilson's comments sections, (Fred Wilson's Insight) and I will say it again, Farmville is the media savior, it is not the iPad. Look at the Farmville business model, 99% of the users do not pay anything, and Mark Pincus is not up in arms about it. In fact, Farmville has been teaching Facebook how to make money. Trying to walk away from the browser is not a good idea. Trying to create artificial scarcities and artificially high prices is not a good idea.

And, while you are at it, call the firefighter.



This is from Social Media Week in early February. (Social Media Week: The Best NY Tech MeetUp Ever)

I Just Became Friends With Anu Shukla

Image via Wikipedia

I just accepted a Facebook friend request from Anu Shukla. I am guessing the friend request is a direct result of a long comment I left on TechCrunch earlier in the day: Zynga Investor Calls Scamville Debate Irrelevant And Unfair.

Fred Wilson is one of the pillars of the New York tech community, and he has been a brilliant investor for over a decade. I have lost count of how many times I came across a truly exciting company only to find out later that was one of Fred’s portfolio companies. If he were not a big investor, and only a blogger, he would still be considered a brilliant visionary.

As for Zynga, both Fred Wilson and Marc Andreessen are investors. I’d give an arm and a leg to belong in the same club as Marc Andreessen. Wouldn’t you?

I have not read all 22 of your “Scamville” posts. And I don’t pretend to have followed all the nuances of your argument.

And TechCrunch is my favorite blog by far. I read it more than I read any other news outlet of any kind, period. So I have respect for its founder and mascot.

You seem to suggest something murky might have been going on, but now, thanks to your work, much of that has been corrected. If that is the case, this story has had a happy ending.

As for Farmville the game, I can vouch for it personally. I have been an avid player for weeks. I never spent a single dime on it. And I am about to buy a million dollar villa there.

I had an email exchange with Mark Pincus only a few days back. I suggested he add a Farmers’ Market to Farmville. He said that was a good idea.

I am glad all three of you are around. What can I say?

By the way, I read those comments by Fred in the original at his blog before I saw them here. Good to know you and I sometimes end up at the same blog in some of the same comments sections.

My first email to Anu was standard. I have more than 130 lingering friend requests from people I don't know. My privacy settings on Facebook are lax. They are set to everyone. So you don't need to be my friend to be able to visit my full Facebook page. But if I don't know you, I am not accepting friend requests.  

Hello Anu. Thanks for the friend request. I am open to online only friendships. But we are going to have to exchange a few emails, get to know each other, and become friends first. :-)

My second email to her a few minutes later: 

Hey. Wait a minute. After I sent you the email, I googled up your name because it sounded kind of familiar. You are t-h-a-t Anu Shukla. Arrington dragged you into a controversy a few months back. I remember reading in real time.

• LinkedIn
• VentureBeat Interview
  

I am honored you should send a friend request my way. I am accepting it right away.

I am guessing this friend request came from a looong comment I left on TechCrunch earlier in the day. I am going to leave more such long comments in future! :-)

Hello friend. 

And so that is that, I got myself a new friend.

• Marketing Shift 
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