Happy Farm Series games are on the wane

Intermediary transaction SEO diagnosis Taobao guest Cloud host technology Hall

FarmVille 2 user growth (Tencent technology map)

Tencent Science and Technology (Tom) Beijing time November 3 News, according to foreign media reports, Zynga new game "Happy Farm 2" (FarmVille 2) released although only a few months, but its performance is better than the company nearly a year of all the Games. However, some analysts believe that the "Happy Farm 2" performance may not be enough to save Zynga's entire town series of games, which is precisely the biggest contributor to the Zynga IPO behind.

Data gratifying

In September this year, Zynga launched its flagship game, "Happy Farm," the second edition, according to the Facebook game data tracking company AppData data show, "Happy Farm 2" current active users to 8.7 million, is from last December "Castle Town" (Castleville) , Zynga's first-day active user broke through 8 million of popular games.

AppData's data show there seems to be no sign that Zynga is losing users. And, after a 8.5 million-day active user record, "Happy Farm 2" in recent days, users have even slightly increased. The situation also makes Zynga executives feel unusually excited, "the game has already brought 500,000 independent buyers to the company, and in Sunday, the" Happy Farm 2 "users bought more than 950,000 dollars for the first time," said Mark Pincus, the company's CEO, Pincus last week's conference call. , including Facebook's split. ”

Pincus went on to say that the company will continue to adhere to the established strategy of investing in lucrative areas, which will continue to invest in "Happy Farm" and "Town Town" games. These games often encourage users to devote more time, money, and virtual goods to farming or building items:

"The company with the ' Happy Farm 2 ' achieved a major breakthrough, we successfully demonstrated their ability to use excellent product design, the excellent 3D games through the browser free of charge to the mass market." We see a very high user participation enthusiasm, the result is very gratifying. The ' Castle Town ' series will soon provide a similar 3D gaming experience and we will continue to invest in this area. "said the Cass, adding.

Worries remain

But while 8.5 million of active users have done well compared with most other games, the number is far below the "Happy Farm" and "City Town" early Zynga hits. At the time, these games had more than 10 million daily active users. In addition, the "Happy Farm 2" research and development costs are far higher than the previous generation of products.

It is reported that the "Happy farm" Development took only 5 weeks, and only 10 people participate in the development. Today's "Happy Farm 2" research and development time of more than 1 years, with more than 50 developers to participate together.

So we think it's hard to see the value of an investment strategy like Zynga unless the number of active users of Happy Farm 2 continues to climb. According to AppData's data, "the Ville" and "Chefville" were less than 5 million active users of desktop-designed games, but we found that many Zynga players now choose to play on mobile devices. On the other hand, social giant Facebook also has more than half of its users using mobile devices for gaming. As a result, both Zynga and Facebook have felt the impact of the mobile wave.

It is worth mentioning that Zynga recently released a revised "City Town 2", after the "town town" days of active users have more than 10 million. According to current trends, the "City Town 2" performance is expected to be the "Happy Farm 2" flat. However, if Zynga's last two heavyweight games, "Happy Farm 2" and "Castle Town", failed to break through the 10 million active users, we cannot be sure that "Town 2" can achieve this goal successfully.

In a memo to employees last month, the company acknowledged the lack of such games. "Zynga will be more focused on casino-style games like the gang Wars (Mafia Wars), which are more likely to bring instant gratification and real-time gaming experience to users," he said.

While Zynga has not reduced its investment in the game, in a sense, "Town 2" will be the company's last resort in this area. Because Zynga has started looking for other, more popular, new game models.