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Zynga has been expanding the gap between them and competing developers now with over 60 million monthly active users when adding up the users across all their games. Playfish, the second largest application developer, has 35 million monthly active users, an impressive number however it’s still far from 60 million. So how does Zynga have such a dominant position on the platform?
The primary reason Zynga has such a dominant position is that they have 34 games, the top three of which add up to almost 40 million monthly active users alone. Not surprisingly, the company’s fastest growing game is Farmville which is growing by upwards of half a million users a day. We previously wrote about Farmville, which replicates many of the features in Farm Town and then improves on them.
Zynga is reportedly making over $100 million a year in revenue and with this massive growth there’s a good chance their on track to generate far more. Facebook appears to still be dominated by startup social gaming companies whereas the iPhone platform is witnessing a drastic shift as large players begin to enter the market. Electronic Arts, ID Software, and Konami are just a few of the companies that have begun to jump into the rapidly growing space.
Facebook has essentially become the largest social gaming portal on the web and with numerous games integrating Facebook Connect into the experience, Facebook is continuing to grow as the leader. Zynga is a large part of that growth and every day the company’s dominance is appearing to grow. While you would have projected growth for many of the application to have slowed two years after the launch it appears that many of these companies are just getting started.
While many other developers have had individual successes, Zynga is one of the few that has repeatedly built large successes. It will be interesting to see how long the company can continue this trend. Do you play any of Zynga’s games? If so which ones?
Good for them, saw how clip a San Fran local news channel did on them and they seem all chilled and a bit unorthodox. Damn them and their addicted games. I only played Texas Holdem though I have taken a hiatus at the moment.
I bet Facebook look at compaines like Zynga and think “I wish we’d thought of doing that earlier. Y’know, having a business model in a social setting”.
Yes Zynga is a skyrocket.
But Zynga’s success isn’t really product-based. They haven’t “improved” Farmtown at all, they’ve just copied it wholesale, and their other two most successful games (Mafia and Poker) are also copies. And they bought Yoville. They also gain seemingly nothing but bad comment after bad comment in their support forums.
My impression of them overall is a company that’s growing in all directions but which, at the same time, has established a very negative internal culture that relies on outsiders to innovate for them. Such companies are generally unsound because in the long term they build very little value. Zynga is reportedly at something like 300 employees at its current rate but this seems to be nothing short of a scramble of highly paid game executives and designers jumping onto the cash-cow.
Where Zynga is threatened is in its long term prospects. There is nothing really preventing many other companies joining in the space and Zynga’s product portfolio is not strong enough to create lasting loyalty. They also seem to be releasing less and less new games, which means internally they’re having conflicts over their direction.
I think Zynga is very quickly shaping up to be one of those companies that will rise and fall very quickly. They don’t, it seems to me, have a direction. Secondly they don’t really seem to be advancing social games but instead simply acting as a predator on games that do arise, which effectively makes them a me-too company and is a foolish long-term strategy. I suspect they will be caught napping when the next trends in social gaming take hold and then there will be layoffs, many of those 300 employees will go, and their remaining low-value properties will end up selling to a publishing label like Activision or EA looking to get into the space.
All of this applies to Playdom as well, who are smaller but seemingly making all the same mistakes (and cloning all the same games)
Playfish very much remains the real leader in social games because they are producing high value game after high value game. They only have 8 games running and each of them is a self-sustained success even though they don’t bother spending seemingly anything on advertising. Theirs is the business model to emulate, not the cheap and twadry tactics of a yesterday’s news company like Zynga.
Carissimi tutti di Facebook, sono molto scontenta della vostra scortese attenzione nei miei confronti,vi ho chiesto tante volte se ho vinto qualcosa e non ho avuto nessuna risposta, io non so parlare in altre lingue so solo parlare L’ITALIANO, dovreste capirmi lo stesso e darmi una adeguata risposta, Spero al più presto, se no mi levo dal gioco perchè mi sembra una presa in giro.Attendo vostre notizie in merito, in Fede Maria Bonaria Fanunza.
chips
How do I remove a poker buddy? I accidently hit “accept” and I have no idea who this person is.
How do I buy drinks and snacks in the poker rooms?