Zynga Recipe

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

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Curiosity Did This

Curiosity did this.

NASA announces $1.1 billion in support for a trio of spaceships

with the aim of having American astronauts flying once more on American spacecraft within five years. ..... The next phase of NASA's commercial spaceflight effort — known as Commercial Crew Integrated Capability, or CCiCap ..... NASA wants to have at least one commercial space taxi carrying astronauts to and from the International Space Station by 2017. ..... the space agency has had to depend on the Russians to fly American astronauts at a cost of roughly $60 milllion a seat ..... Sierra Nevada is testing its Dream Chaser space plane, which looks like a miniaturized version of the space shuttle. .... NASA is spending billions of dollars to develop the Orion multipurpose crew vehicle for deep-space exploration, as well as a heavy-lift rocket known as the Space Launch System. Those spacecraft are being designed to send astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid by 2025, and to Mars and its moons in the 2030s

The public-private partnership in action is of great interest to me.

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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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Zynga And Mobile

Zynga and Facebook are in the same boat. They are both trying to figure out mobile.

Zynga's Rocky Shift to Mobile

To turn around its flagging business, Zynga Inc. is betting big on mobile games and creating a network that connects mobile-game players..... people have shifted to playing games on their mobile devices instead of on personal computers. Zynga says the number of people who play its games on mobile devices is growing three times faster than the number of those who play on the Web. .... Zynga's shares closed Friday at $2.72, down 73% from its December IPO price of $10 ..... Pincus said his vision for mobile games is to connect a large network of game players across a variety of platforms

Fred Wilson, Mark Zuckerberg And Mobile

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Zynga: Could It Reinvent Itself?

This blogger below argues Zynga got down the science right, but is failing on the art part.

Zyngapocalypse Now (And What Comes Next?)

Both inside and outside the walls of Facebook, the story of social games has become one of dead geese and golden eggs, flatlined growth, formulaic games and shady practises..... the main problem in social games was that the product was almost identical across all providers, and that social game makers had trapped themselves into thinking that it had to be so. I said that this had led them to treat the market as akin to fast food ..... I thought Zynga would miss the opportunity to spend incoming investment on building better products and instead inflate the kind of product and business model that they already had. .... without constant and heavy promotion, social games tend to fade away pretty quickly ...... the business model of social games is hollow because the value it provides is poor. ..... The obsession with tactics is directly related to the obsession with metrics, and this leads to a culture which devalues original thinking. Social games have the exact same problem as network television in that respect, in that there are far too many quants running the show, demanding numeric proof for decisions. Quants understand little to nothing of why players play games ..... Timidity rules. .... The second generation needs to be thinking like HBO, not network television. It takes research and prototyping time to develop good game dynamics, but more than that it takes the right technology, talent and faith. This last quality is perhaps most frightening because it pretty much means letting the inmates run the asylum. ...... You may wish that game design was a process, but it’s an art. ..... why should the player play your social game as opposed to a downloaded PC game, a DS game, an Xbox game and so on .... ........... Social games do not bring people together. Most players in fact play them in a largely single-player fashion, making contact purely for reasons of necessity like trading, earning Energy and so on. ..... Players play to achieve, to do, to build, to create, to explore, to destroy and to win. ... What games don’t do particularly well is the whole “living a virtual life” thing. ....... (this is why poker is still Zynga’s most solid game), it’s all about the self-propelled, self-organised and self-successful player. “Social” simply helps that happen faster, in what we designers are increasingly calling “parallel design”. ...... most players’ game graphs in their Facebook games are either empty or full of the orphaned accounts of those who stopped playing. ..... G2 social games will probably have very different delivery to G1, like the difference between “software” and “app”. ..... If Yahoo was “Search, Generation One” then Google was “Search, Generation Two”. .... A similar shift is what will make “Social Games, Generation Two” real

I think the guy just called Zynga the Yahoo of social games, as in what Yahoo was for search. That is not flattering. Zynga is taking a beating in the public market, sure. But maybe it can reinvent itself.

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