Zynga and its friends: a one-person distributor and developer

Zynga's new role is to become a gaming social network and development platform for social networking tools on Facebook, Apple, and possibly Tencent. The question is, are these big companies really their friends? Wen |CBN reporter Ai Yi more than 250 million months active users, 1 million online players per second, earning a breakthrough of 1 billion U.S. dollars-this is a social gaming company's external relish of data. However, at a press conference on June 26 at the Zynga San Francisco headquarters, when the company's founder and CEO, Mark Pincus, Mark Ping One by one of the data to the media and hundreds of employees, he did not disclose another important figure-85% The Zynga game flows from Facebook, the world's largest social networking site. This is a source of unease among many investors, especially when Facebook's share price continues to fall, and Zynga, which landed on Nasdaq six months earlier, is the most heavily distressed internet company. The simple logic is that if Facebook's user activity slows and the flow of liquidity weakens, they will directly affect the activity of Zynga users, which will reduce Zynga's earnings. Investors have been pinning their hopes on Zynga proving that it is not a manor developer hired by Facebook, but rather a more imaginative growth. Zynga is trying to do that. June 26, the company released a number of important products, in addition to a few social games on Facebook and mobile platform, more interesting is a series of tools: Third-party-Oriented application interface, the mobile platform for the game developer Partner Alliance, as well as on the zynga.com Game Network " Zynga with Friends "-all this suggests that Zynga is no longer a simple social-game developer. "Some of my colleagues are worried that we should publish so many things at once, but I really want you to see these changes," Mark Ping Cass told the first financial weekly. And the most important change is that it is becoming a stand-alone gaming platform--in addition to its own games, it will include games provided by Third-party developers, and, more importantly, Zynga is building a gaming "social network" based on these games. On Zynga with friends, you can see all the players in one game at a time--some of them are friends on your Facebook, QQ or iphone, but more in your social circle. Now, they all appear on your zynga.com personal homepage. It includes a list of game buddies, a mobile update of everyone's game status (Social stream), a profile page for each player, a quick login to a game's interface, and a chat tool between players. It can also support a variety of games at the same time operating on this platform. Looks like it and a social networking module has been a fewThere is no difference. More importantly, it can aggregate people who play through different platforms on the platform of Zynga with Friends, which borrows one of Zynga's most popular mobile games, word with Friends. Zynga claims it is a new social invention because it connects people on different devices and platforms of Facebook, Apple iOS and Android to the same space. "We created a unique gaming community where your Facebook, my kindle and his iphone 4S could play a game and communicate on it," said Manuel Bronstein, general manager for Zynga platform business. He thinks the game is a product that makes existing social networks more active, and more than 60% of people become friends on social networks after playing a game together. In other words, it will be a social networking tool that overrides Facebook, Apple iOS and Android (and will include Tencent in the future)--one or more games where people can get to know each other and even forge new social relationships here. This means that users will increasingly be less reliant on Facebook-although the zynga.com Zynga with friends is still required to log on on the computer via a Facebook account, but there is no such requirement on mobile devices. And if they can get to know more people and create a new social relationship on Zynga.com, then his Facebook account doesn't make sense for the game. But as a social-gaming company that still relies heavily on Facebook and has received a lot of special attention from Facebook (which Facebook even agreed to help Zynga secure a certain amount of revenue), Zynga's current stance is subtle. In an interview with Caijing Weekly, Zynga product director Reed Shaffner said that players on the PC side still need to log on through their Facebook account, and that the future might depend on the situation, but Manuel Bronstein quickly took the message that Users login to Zynga with friends via Facebook if they're used to it, and most gamers have a Facebook account, it's not bad in itself, it makes it easy for users, and it doesn't affect users in Zynga with Friends to know more players on other platforms and devices. Zynga is wary of how to define Zynga with friends, who is also a large shareholder in Facebook. Zynga can't wait to announce ZyngaWith friends is a unique "social invention" and a unique "player network", but it never defines "social" (Social) and "network" (receptacle) together. "I don't think so, because we're actually importing players ' identities and data from Facebook and other relationships," he said. "It should be said to be a social hall (Social Lobby) that allows players to connect more closely," Bronstein told the first financial weekly. "At least at this stage, players continue to consume Zynga's games by different means of payment (such as Facebook credit virtual currency, iOS and Android apps), and Zynga with friends brings them to a platform for communication and interaction." "I think the biggest value of Zynga with friends is the way it measures the ' active social network ' that we're creating, and it's the game that makes social networking more active. "You can also say that Zynga with friends created the network effect caused by the game, and we can change the way many games used to look like poker, such as the word guessing, and people play a different game," he told the first financial weekly. "Ping-Cass is trying to return the value of Zynga's new platform for social networking to the game itself." In his view, the reason people will gather in Zynga with friends is still because people love the game itself and people socialize because of games. "Why are Xbox games so popular, not only because of the hardware itself and the content of the game, but also because of the communication that people play together," Zynga said. We want to bring together the social effects of our games on all platforms to change a lot of things. "Ping Cass said. and the "network effect" means to differentiate-it needs to be built on a fully interoperable network. Choosing this network is bound to mean a certain degree of alienation from Facebook. Although Zynga now does not want to decorum with Facebook. This is also the most important step that Zynga announced in October last year, announcing the project Z program, that users can play games on their zynga.com platform. "' Project Z ' is a code name, and today's actions and a series of future actions will be based on our initial plan." "Bronstein said. What is not to be overlooked is the extent to which Zynga has become an independent manor-house owner from Facebook's estate developers, deciding how many more loyal players it can attract on other platforms. The answer is not Google + but on the mobile platform-Apple iOS and Android-supported devices are ZynThe next battlefield of Ga. Zynga upgraded David Ko, the senior vice president of mobile operations, to the company's chief mover (figuratively mobile officer) at the beginning of the year, to demonstrate its intention to move to the next growth focus. In the past year, Zynga has improved in the area of mobile gaming. Zombie swipe and word with friends are the best products on the Zynga mobile platform and have been among the top ten in the App Store rankings. According to David Ko, the number of users who play Zynga games on a variety of mobile devices every day is around 22 million, but he has not disclosed the share of mobile gaming in the company's revenue. But he thinks there will be more ways to make money on mobile devices. Both the payment and program buying channels on iOS are well developed, and users on Android are less willing to pay than they do on iOS, but as the Android version upgrades, users ' pay ratios are rising. Ko said Zynga has launched a built-in advertising system for Android and iOS games. But these are not the crux of the problem. "The threshold for developing and running a game on a mobile device is pretty low compared to the one on Facebook." Ko told the first financial weekly. Another effect is that a large number of developers are abandoning their plans to run the game on Facebook and moving to a mobile device platform. This is a complicated matter for Zynga. Zynga has the ability to recruit the best game developers and designers, and to launch a variety of games on a team-wide basis to improve the success of the game in the market hit. But this does not stop more small teams to develop the game rapidly exploding red-draw something is a typical example. Of course, people eventually saw what was happening, and Zynga decisively shot to buy draw Somnething's developer Omgpop for nearly 200 million dollars. But Zynga clearly cannot move 200 million of dollars every few months to remove a potential threat and take it as its own. More realistically, it will be labeled "Powered by Zynga" For these future popular mobile social games, making them part of the Zynga ecosystem. David Ko says Zynga is opening doors to outsiders, inviting mobile game developers from around the world to join Zynga's network to develop mobile games for them, "I think the last thing to come together will be the best developers and the most outstanding games they have developed." "In the first list of developer partners released by Zynga, the well-known game development team Atari, Crash Lab, Fat Pebble and Sava Transmedia are listed. These developersGame will be on the platform of Zynga's newly released gaming network this summer and become a game for Zynga. This is not hard to imagine for the benefit of Third-party game developers-a handful of games where independent game developers need one or two of outstanding game to stand out in hundreds of thousands of games, Zynga is the only company that can get the attention and downloads from the name of the brand. More importantly, Zynga has more marketing and outreach resources than the small development team can reach. Zynga is not disclosing its share of third-party game developers, but apparently it is deliberately creating its own mobile game ecosystem. And just as Zynga with friends actually forms a gaming social network above Facebook, the ecosystem of Zynga and third party mobile game developers also forms another thing that resembles the "game App Store", and the problem is that Will Apple welcome such an independent "game shop" in its own ecosystem? Google play is more flexible in this regard. David Co did not respond directly to the problem. He told the first financial weekly that Zynga would provide help for these game developers in terms of technical support and marketing, and that people would still consume these programs once and for all through the Apple App Store and payment channels. All that remains is the problems of Zynga and the game developers. and Zynga will ensure that the games it develops are treated in the same way as third-party developers. Whether it becomes a gaming social network or a game development platform, Zynga is a completely different role in the ecosystem of social gaming. At the same time, it makes the ecosystem itself more complex-it will form a gaming-based social Atlas via Zynga with friends, but most of the source of the social graph is Facebook; it tries to be the Federation-master of all independent game developers, but this is the same as the mobile platform ( The role of Apple iOS and Google Android is an unavoidable conflict. On the other hand, Zynga does not seem to be fully prepared to transform itself into a "platform-level" company. Announcing the ambitious plan, the company also unveiled several new versions of the game that tried to perpetuate the global popularity: the farm Ville 2 as Farm Ville sequel, and the Sister chapter Chef Ville, which is the theme of cooking, to extend word with Friends's successful macth with Friends and the subsequent casino of Zynga poker. If Zynga is really going to play the dual role of being both a platform trader and a developer, it's really becoming more and more like Tencent's social-networking platform in China. And, Zynga with FriEnds in this particular market in China is likely to face a more complex situation. Zynga's game and player data in China are built on Tencent's servers, and it sounds like a joke to let Tencent share its data with Apple, Sina, everyone and other platforms. "The only thing we need to do to understand this complex situation is to find a solution to it." Manuel Bronstein the first financial weekly.