Zynga estimated to be worth more than EA - Page 4

Staff were explicitly told to steal competitor's ideas, said the anonymous senior staffer, speaking to alt.paper SF Weekly. "I don't f***ing want innovation," the ex-employee claims company founder Mark Pincus told him. "You're not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers."

On November 02 2010 04:21 Deadlyfish wrote:
I'm happy. EAs games suck so bad, they just release game after game without putting any effort into any of them. Cant remember the last good game they made.

EA and Activision (not blizzard) should just close. They want to make money more than they want to make a good game. Go Zynga i guess

On November 02 2010 05:50 VonLego wrote:



This, a hundred times this.

Zyngea or whatever it is called is the fast food market of video games. Are their products good for you? Hell no. Are they delicious? Not really.

Does just about everyone eat fast food at some point in any given month? Yes.

Does just about everyone eat out at a nice restaurant (aka the SC2's of the food world for those who I've lost with the metaphor) every single month? No.

On November 02 2010 05:51 Krigwin wrote:
The problem is you people are making the mistake of assuming people play Farmville because they like to play Farmville, or that people eat at McDonald's because they just like McDonald's. I mean sure, those people do exist, but proportionally how many of them do you think there are out of the millions of people who play Farmville or eat at McDonald's?

Since the dawn of industry smart people have realized they can make a lot of money by exploiting not-as-smart people and selling them addictive crap. How many wars and disputes have been fought and countless dollars have been wasted over drugs? It took decades for people to realize nicotine is addictive, and then even more years (and lots of angry lawsuits) later for us to restrict tobacco to the level that we do today, and tobacco companies are still getting around it - snus, electronic cigarettes, etc.

McDonald's has made such a huge business and global presence through dastardly economic manipulation and exploitation of its target market worthy of a Bond movie. Everything from the psychological traps aimed at children (playgrounds, subliminal branding, etc), to the chemical engineering of its food to be as empty and addictive as possible, to the Wal-Mart-esque economic bullying of suppliers and local markets to muscle out as much competition as possible. When you look at all of these combined factors, are you still going to say stupid nonsense like "McDonald's is just popular because people have different tastes and if you're angry you're just elitist!"?

The same with Zynga. I don't know how many of you have actually played Farmville, but it's not actually a game. It's a cleverly-engineered psychological trap created by an actual behavioral psychologist and an unscrupulous, sleazy businessman with no concept of quality or game design. It uses every contemptible trick in the book to spread itself and keep people hooked, from dressing up spam as Facebook messages, to a rotating catalogue of copied and/or outright stolen content, to using guilt trips as an actual game mechanic to keep people playing, to using fictional monopoly money to disguise the real amount of money players are spending, to mastercrafting the illusion of "free" while at the same time running possibly the world's largest microtransaction scheme. If these tactics sound familiar, they should - everyone from EA with the Sims to Blizzard with WoW are doing this same shit, and they're going to keep on doing it because it's profitable, and if you're going to call me elitist for "demeaning" the people "lesser" than myself for falling for this shit, then I guess I just must be elitist.

So I funded the company myself but I did every horrible thing in the book to, just to get revenues right away. I mean we gave our users poker chips if they downloaded this zwinky toolbar which was like, I dont know, I downloaded it once and couldn't get rid of it. *laughs*

On November 02 2010 06:06 fleeze wrote:


what most people in this thread are missing is that this will affect the gaming industry as a whole.
zynga and bigpoint are already buying many good game developers. guess what they are producing? the old AOE developers (Ensemble) for example were bought. now they're producing Age of Empires Online, a browser game. the more studios they buy the less good game developers will actually develop GAMES.
so REAL gamers should be angry.

On November 02 2010 06:06 fleeze wrote:


what most people in this thread are missing is that this will affect the gaming industry as a whole.
zynga and bigpoint are already buying many good game developers. guess what they are producing? the old AOE developers (Ensemble) for example were bought. now they're producing Age of Empires Online, a browser game. the more studios they buy the less good game developers will actually develop GAMES.
so REAL gamers should be angry.

On November 02 2010 05:41 Seide wrote:
I dont understand your hostility for the simple statement of "wow takes more dedication to play than farmville". Do you disagree with this or something? All you really did with that statement is whip out your e-dick out and wave it around, but did nothing of value with it.

Congradulations on your achievements...? I come from a similar WoW background as you. Raided with Rush/Gentlemens Club and did some high level PvP, though the PvP mostly in vanilla, arenas I stopped after getting glad in season 1 and 2. It is not anything special.

While WoW has been appealing to the casual crowd, it is not on the same level of casual as Farmville or Mafia Wars. You are not going to get server first kills or gladiator ranking in arena playing the same type of "casual" as you do in those games.

Content in WoW is on a timeframe, things are made easier and more accessible to casuals as time goes on and the content ages. As there is no point to locking that content away from them, just because they dont want to put in the same amount of time as the guild who got server 1st, and is already bored out of their minds killing the same thing, week after week.

On November 02 2010 06:09 Seide wrote:
So they fall into the psychological trap, but otherwise are happy with life and what they are doing. Who cares? They certainly don't, why should you. Or do you think that your opinion of consumer culture being terrible is more valuable than their indifference because you did not fall into this trap?
People will do what they do, for the most illogical reasons. Trying to logic it out is asking for a headache.

Zynga found their niche, they provide a service that people log into, kill time and have a personal attachment to. Saying that was cleverly engineered by Zinga to "trick" them into liking their game and that thsoe people are not acting of their own free will is a bit crazy.

The users like the service, why the users like the service or whatnot is irrelevant. Zynga still deserves the props from being able to market and please people like they do.

Sure I'm mad that this takes away possibly talented designers and developers from creating the games I enjoy to play, but it is what it is.

On November 02 2010 04:37 Myles wrote:
And I doubt every game developer is going to be jumping ship to create browser based games, unless it becomes possible to play games like SC2 through a browser.