Does the Zynga model have a future in the Chinese market?

Not long ago, a US company called Zynga was widely watched by the domestic industry for its latest round of 250 million dollars in financing. The company has financed more than $500 million trillion, with foreign media claiming its 2010 revenue of 850 million dollars and net profit of nearly 400 million dollars. The new round of financing has doubled its valuation from $4 billion trillion in 2010 to 7 billion to 9 billion dollars, surpassing the market capitalisation of EA's current $6 billion trillion.

Zynga model-Fast iterations

And the traditional sense of the Chinese people for the European and American gaming companies, the impression that Zynga is more like a set of China's online gaming enterprises, and it played to the extreme.

Zynga's first large-scale domestic knowledge was that there was a rumor in 2009 that Facebook had a "fake" game of stealing food in the country-yes, Zynga did it. This is a social game developer founded in June 2007, relying on the September online game "Texas Poker" to earn the first bucket of gold, followed by "rapid iterative" way to replicate the imitation of a number of games launched. At present, there are 54 games distributed on each platform. Zynga occupies six of the top ten Facebook games. Zynga has a total of 235 million active subscribers worldwide, with a total of 65 million active users--and World of Warcraft has a total of 11.5 million users.

Zynga's first requirement for game development is "fast". This requirement is the first standard of all Zynga operations, whether it be development, operation, operations, or even recruitment. Zynga requires the team to complete the development as quickly as possible and start producing results as soon as possible. To this end, Zynga advocates modular iterative production, modular game systems, and then in the development and operation of the whole module replacement to achieve the game version of the upgrade and the increase in functionality.

Zynga's second feature is its grip on prop-charging mode, far beyond the other European and American game manufacturers, and personally empirical evidence has been circulating in the domestic game circle of a doubt: "Exports of European and American online games, prop charges whether it can do?" "Zynga says it can and runs faster than domestic game makers.

Zynga's third feature is to first enclosure and then mining data. Zynga has found that some of the game's themes or forms, which are not yet full or even developed, will quickly line up a batch of products and occupy users in the field. Mining data in depth after a large user size. For Zynga, games are algorithms, software, and human-computer interactions designed to target user behavior. This is contrary to the fact that most European and American gaming companies emphasize gameplay and even artistic traditions.

The one thing Zynga is most criticized for, but most of all, is that imitation-or plagiarism-can also be said to be a cottage. Zynga will be eyeing any new social games that look promising, quickly rolling out similar products and leaving the original product behind. In a legally sound market in Europe and the United States, Zynga is paying the unthinkable price of the domestic market. But Zynga doesn't care because its game income is much higher than the compensation paid for copyright lawsuits.

Zynga seems to have added a new feature recently, with a slightly exaggerated pace of acquisition of a large number of game development teams and companies. These five features can be summed up as the Zynga model – sounding very familiar, which can be found in almost all of China's well-known online gaming companies shadow. Thus, whether this model can help Chinese game companies to rise rapidly into the international giants has become a topic in the industry.

Does the Zynga model work in China?

China's online gaming companies have struggled to move forward in multidimensional standards. There may not be any industry that will be plugged into project management, software development, Internet services ... Even the label of Art management. The more labels, the more standards. No company or person can achieve the ultimate in every standard.

So which one is more important? Or is there any that can be abandoned? This issue has been debated for many years, but the reality is that all enterprises continue to carry all the standards and strive to improve in all aspects.

If the Zynga model represents more advanced productivity, it's a relief for Chinese game makers, and it's what most gaming industry practitioners are good at: Optimizing user experience details, quickly replicating existing project templates, looking for sources of traffic, and increasing conversion rates,--zynga. Optimize consumption guide to promote ARPU value ... All in all: use data to make decisions and give up developers ' preferences.

There is a good model to verify that the Zynga model is going to work. In 2010, China's online gaming market in the first negative growth of the time node, if the whole industry to adopt Zynga model, this downward curve segment will still exist? In that way, the number of games on the line last year will be more, homogenization more serious, so the number of game users down, but the user experience and income will be improved-non-paying users will lose interest in such a game, and paid users will pay a higher amount of spending.

To simplify the model to the extreme can be described as: imagine a triangle, intercept the top 20%, the truncated small triangle magnified two to three times times. So, compared to previous graphics, which area is larger? Therefore, the Dragon Tiger Leopard thinks, if the domestic game industry popularize Zynga mode, industry scale will shrink. The Zynga model has left two user groups, one of the Internet's primary users with no gaming experience, Zynga has brought them into the game, and a paid user with no particular preference for the game, Zynga has earned a high income from them and provided them with a quality gaming experience.

In addition to these two people, there are game experience, the game has its own cognitive, taste and preferences, pay the willingness and ability of the crowd to do? In Europe and America they still belong to EA and Blizzard, but in China they are scattered among game makers. So the situation is simple: Does any game vendor abandon any of its own users in order to apply a seemingly successful Zynga model? The Zynga model does not work in China.

Zynga has only one, and Zynga can have countless

As mentioned above, Zynga is "innovative" in terms of both model and product. To a large extent, Zynga's success is based on the high specialization of traditional gaming companies in Europe and the United States, leaving a lot of light entertainment market space.

The point is that since Zynga entered the Japanese market in March 2010, there has been no appreciable gain-for Japan, where traditional games and internet entertainment are highly developed, Zynga's gadgets are too small for pediatrics. But for Europe and the United States and other commercial Internet concepts too deeply rooted in the region, Zynga is promising, and the future is limitless. So what can Zynga bring to the Chinese gaming industry?

This issue must be based on the characteristics of the future Chinese Internet users to consider. Europe and the United States or Japan and South Korea are two different reference samples, simply by making a model must not acclimatized. The industrial environment that China can foresee in the next few years is: a very large number of potential game users who are very difficult to dig deep + international elite players + great geographical differences + too much to value cheap platform.

This determines that a eminence class of Zynga enterprises in China is unlikely to emerge. But in areas such as the two or three market, the market for people over the age of 35, there is considerable demand for companies like Zynga. Imagine a company that develops social games specifically for residents of a particular province, and what is the value of a company's product layout in all the regional forums or community platforms in the province? or to develop one or more social games that all of China's 60后 netizens would like to play, and what is the value of such a business? In China, Zynga can have countless.

Conclusion

After reading the trends and strategies, the Dragon Leopard believes it is necessary to revisit the common sense of Zynga's revelations to Chinese internet companies. This is not a new concept, just once again to verify the user experience, data mining, product details and so on is the only way to success.

But unfortunately, whether it is online games or other Internet products, can be in these points to achieve the ultimate is too little. The rise of the 2010 new games enterprises But a few, in the Dragon and Tiger Leopard visits in the various families have said that the pursuit of details is the key to win the chance of success.

Zynga is a revelation if trends are needed to decide where companies are going to go, and if they want to deep plowing more value in their existing businesses. The Zynga model is a case in which companies in China's internet industry are worth studying, but finding information that is good for their businesses is not easy.

Zynga has only one. (Edit/Zhang Xing)