Social Games darling Zynga builds hundreds of millions of users in three years

With hundreds of millions of users accumulating in just two or three years, the social gaming company Zynga has become the new darling of Silicon Valley's greatest strength.　　Wen |cbn reporter Yang Ying trainee reporter Chao Silicon Valley has always been triggered by the global excitement point of the company, such as the 2004 Facebook, 2006 Twitter, and this time the limelight is Zynga. For gamers, Zynga is a gaming platform for smartphones such as Facebook, MySpace and other social networking sites or iphones, and its little games like Farmville or Mafia Wars are easy to work with and emphasize cooperation with friends. For the restless Wall Street, Zynga, founded in 2007, was the first American company to build a successful business model by selling virtual products.　　Mark Pincus, its founder, Mark Ping Wall Street that there are really millions of people willing to pay to buy a special octopus in a virtual aquarium or to buy a hog on a farm. In May this year, Zynga said it had been authorised to issue shares, its current valuation at $4.6 billion trillion, almost as Activision Blizzard Inc., a gaming giant. 1/3 of the total market value and higher than EA (Electronics Arts Inc. 2/3 of the total market value.　　Tech blog TechCrunch estimates that Zynga's revenue is expected to be as high as $500 million this year. Zynga games are free. In Farmville, for example, players can grow and harvest crops on the ground, turning a common land into a large farm. To be good, you have to earn virtual money through games to buy more seeds, animals and equipment.　　Since all players are logged on to Facebook, they can work with friends and family or colleagues and compete with them for the right to show off. It sounds familiar.　　Yes, like Tencent? Look, this time do not put the cottage hat on Tencent head. Before Zynga came up with the pet game PetVille, "QQ Pet" had reached a record of 1 million people online. At the end of 2007, Tencent's total revenue had reached 3.8209 billion yuan, at the current exchange rate of 523.1 million U.S. dollars. QQ Games highest simultaneous online accounts (including small casual games) up to 3.8 million.　　Ma's summary is: In 2007, the company's overall portfolio of diversified business has again achieved good results-and Zynga has only just made a profit. Ma Teng should be very happy. The story of Zynga's miraculous business success is being concentrated on the front page of the New York Times. The cover of Businessweek and the close-up report of the Economist, Zynga is so high-profile that the Tencent seems to have no reason to not be praised-it's also a business that adds up, and why does it always accuse me of greedWithout a dislike? Zynga and Tencent do have a bit of an image. Virtual goods are the main source of revenue for Zynga, crops, coffee cups or guns. Corn seed price 10 cents, 20 cents per cow ...　　The prices of these little things look reasonable, but they account for 90% of Zynga's income and 10% for advertising. The way of success is similar. According to TechCrunch's estimate, Zynga's playing home is only 1% to 2% to pay, But the Zynga user base is large enough: Zynga, according to app research firm Appdata.com, has 100 million users in just 2.5 of the time, and currently has a monthly number of independent visitors of 211 million, more than half of Facebook's users.　　The figure is 3 times times higher than the playfish of EA, the second-ranked competitor, and is 4 times times the third-ranked Playdom.　　Zynga games, for example Farmville, there are two kinds of play: one is hard work, that is, the harvest to accumulate points, or invite more friends to the game, to help them (such as weeding) or exchange gifts (such as using your sheep for his eggplant), in order to expand their farm size. But if you want to skip over these time-consuming processes (usually by repeatedly clicking on a key), or if you don't have enough friends to help you with the task, the system will recommend the little things you need to pay for. It looks like you're going to trade in cash for something you can't see, but if you're going to win the so-called "sense of accomplishment," you'll pay for it.　　Such success is affirmed, steal the music may not only Ma, Shi Yuzhu probably will be very happy. It's a fashionable model-the New York Times portrays Zynga as a social gaming Google, and Tencent is now in the eye of the Fortune magazine for a role in Google's hegemony.　　"Tencent will challenge Google and Amazon to become one of the world's internet giants within 5 years," said Jim Breyer, head of Accel, an international venture capital company. The upbeat venture did not mention Tencent's "cottage" problem, which he was probably not a Tencent gamer. By contrast, the 27-year-old Zhu Wenwei, who has almost played all the games that Tencent has launched, though not so much fun, "but sometimes the work is boring, and pass the time." "Zhu Wenwei said. Every working day to the company, he will first spend an hour in the QQ game to grab parking spaces or steal food, and the weekend house at home playing "The King of the battlefield."　　He spends 200 yuan a month on QQ games. Zynga is also under a similar charge, though most of the time it comes from the gaming industry. Nick Saint, a columnist for the American Tech blog Business Insider, said in his blog that many of Zynga's games look like plagiarism to others, at least on the surface. Like the most famous Farmvill.E replicated Facebook's early popular farm game Farmtown (Chinese users are more familiar with happy farms earlier in the country), and pet games FishVille look like Fish world, and gang games Mafia Wars followed by a mob　　Wars's game appears. Because of these dubious game ideas, Zynga is often in court.　　In the case of Mafia wars and mob wars, Zynga was awarded a court award for Mob Wars's developer David Maestriwas at least 7 million dollars, the exact amount is not disclosed, and there are 9 million of dollars. But he never bothered about the cottage. In his view, the exquisite game picture and twists and turns of the plot is never Zynga's pursuit. In a visit to the New York Times, he admits that Zynga's games are really silly.　　But what he wants is a simple style to attract enough players and stick to them.　　Zynga knows how to bury this little hook, allowing users to come back and revisit the game: Timed rewards, motivational incentives and the accumulation of virtual wealth in relationships with friends. These repetitive clicks and reliance on favors to attract users are described by some game designers as "playing down the concept of the game." Tian, general manager of Zynga's Beijing company, interpreted it as "data-driven product decisions". "In fact, any SNS game, the workload after the on-line is your game is the key point of success, it is a service, continuous improvement, continuous service, continuous expansion in order to have vitality." "Zynga is using a lot of data to support any decision in this area, which requires strong technical skills, especially analytical and statistical techniques," Tian said at the ChinaJoy forum just concluded. "Getting feedback quickly and reacting quickly is probably what Zynga is better at than a fresh and interesting game idea." Farmville has been increasing the type of virtual goods, and its studio hangs a chart about the size of a wall, filled with virtual objects, which are selected from employee ideas and user requests, and will consider whether to join the game the next time the upgrade is improved. In addition to technical staff, the game team has people like behavioral psychologists. Each click of the player is recorded, which directly affects the next click. >> This has also made Zynga's internal competition extremely competitive. They are doing every day to change the details of the game hundreds of times observation, once the idea is hired, you can get a promotion. According to Pinks's management style called "true elite Leadership", each game's studio leader set goals and has the right to achieve them in any way.　　Pinks told the media that this is the management of Amazon CEO Bezos. WorldOn the fear of serious two words, seriously done, there will be rewards. "My life is under a lot of pressure. "I like to relax through the game," said Alena Meeker, a 32-Year-old financial analyst.　　"She works for a securities firm in San Francisco while playing some of Zynga's best games, about an hour a day and spending 20 to 40 dollars a week." Even Chinese players are willing to go over the wall to play. Wang Yuyu, 25, says the benefit of Farmville is to kill time. "It doesn't have to be brain, you have time and you are good." "he said. The competition between Zynga players is not obvious, but "the so-called achievement can also make people yy, experience satisfaction." With millions of of these users, who became famous overnight and made a big profit, Zynga did it.　　In the fastest growing 2009, Zynga grew even faster than Facebook. Cheng Wan.　　Snobbery of the market and the media have respect for the winners, if the "cottage" to the first, you are the first.　　However, the success of almost all of Zynga's games is based on the Facebook platform, and the place that initially made it successful is now fraught with uncertainty. In the past, Facebook's user message feeds was an important way for Zynga to take full advantage of promoting game updates, and every time your buddy picks up a duckling or beats a gangster, the system pops up. But it has also caused users to resent the millions of potential players that Zynga did not have to spend. The Facebook user who is scrambling to create a "I don't care about your farm, your fish, your park or your gang!!! "The protest group, more than 6 million members. This eventually led Facebook to cancel the feature this March and no longer allow Zynga and other app developers to promote the game in message prompts.　　This means that Zynga will have to pay more for the same promotional results later. The bigger paradox is that Facebook began testing and pushing its unified virtual currency system credits in April, and signed 37 contracts with most game developers. The change has led to a drop in Zynga's game flow and offset some of the profits. Pinks, who had planned to abandon Facebook in May and launch a social network called "Zynga Live," but its fatal point is that while a large number of Zynga users are enjoying themselves, this is based on the community, and if Zynga is independent, it may lose a lot of traffic to Facebook,　　But those social relationships are also not replicable. This is not as good as Tencent. Tencent relies on QQ to unite its 500 million users. Instead, the current strategy is to spread the eggs in other baskets. After a tie-up with Yahoo at the end of May and a July gain of more than $100 million trillion in investment and a "strategic" partnership, Zynga gained the day at the end of JulyThe soft silver company 150 million U.S. dollars investment, and jointly expand the Japanese market. Independence is not the only way out. Pinks had three startups before Zynga, and the three companies were sold by him. Who knows if he will sell Zynga? should not recently, otherwise it will not be frequently acquired. August 5, Zynga also spent billions of yen to buy Japanese gaming company Unoh.　　Zynga will use Tokyo as a strategic base for the Asian social gaming market, according to the Japan Economic News report. Earlier in May, Zynga bought Hippede, a social gaming company in Beijing, that made Tian the general manager of Zynga's Beijing company.　　The company declined the interview request, and an email from midnight 1:50 explained that it was not the right time to do it-it was Silicon Valley's working hours, and it was possible to have all the PR privileges in place. Whatever the future, Zynga is now clearly one of the most successful companies in the company, it could also be the company that made him realize his dream-though no one knew what it was, but he had more than once stressed that he had to take control of his own destiny and make a profit in the first place, and he even said in a speech　　He used all the "horrible" methods in the book. This is a different place for the rest of the people in the valley and he is more familiar with the business. The 44-Year-old, who graduated from Harvard Business School, was a venture partner and worked for At&t. In other words, he's not like the people from Stanford on the West Coast.　　But like everyone else, he loved his dog, a clumsy company named to commemorate the dead American Bulldog.　　Zynga, read it, Singa. Zynga's success factor platform is a good platform for Facebook.　　Between September 2006 and September 2007, Facebook's ranking in the U.S. was up from 60th to 7th, and by March 2010, Facebook's presence in the United States had overtaken Google as the most visited site in the country. Aggressively promoting Zynga is one of Facebook's biggest advertisers.　　In addition, Zynga also makes full use of user message feeds, the game's internal directory, and other ways to promote the model similar to viral marketing, these low-cost promotional methods for it to obtain millions of potential players. Game evolution that's the point.　　Zynga is adept at opening up and perfecting its social functions in people's favorite games, and the core features include perfecting their social and interactive functions, such as getting friends to help clean up the aquarium, or requiring "neighbor" assistance to get the job done. Sticky user This is another point.　　By using a quick feedback mechanism to study how players use these games, Zynga continues to improve the game to stick with users and to use the potential pay mentality to lead users to purchase virtual items for more revenue opportunities. UseThe capital factor has allowed Zynga to succeed quickly and attract a lot of VCs with its high revenues and rewards, and a lot of money can be used to buy fast-growing new games, such as YoVille and Hippede products, using its own publishing system to get new users.