Egy játékgyártó lesz az Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Google, Twitter után a közösségi web következő nagy dobása?
Orientation for new employees of Zynga, the fast-growing maker of Facebook games like FarmVille and Mafia Wars, can be a heady affair given the company’s outsize ambitions – all of which are embodied in Mark Pincus, Zynga’s founder. „I thought, it’s 2007, and this can’t be all that the Internet is meant to be,” he said. There has to be more than „a garage sale, a bookstore, a search engine and a portal,” he added in a good-natured putdown of the Web giants eBay, Amazon, Google and Yahoo. He said the opportunity to build an online entertainment empire was „like search before Google came along.” The Zynga Game Network is the hottest start-up to emerge from Silicon Valley since Twitter and, before that, Facebook. Unlike Twitter, which has meager revenue, Zynga is on a path to pocket $835 million in revenue this year. While Facebook needed four and a half years to reach 100 million users, Zynga crossed that mark after just two and a half years. Zynga’s empire is made up of cartoonish online games that even Mr. Pincus acknowledges are goofy. And most striking, given its financial success, is the fact that the games are free to everyone. Zynga makes money, by and large, only when a small fraction of its users pay real money for make-believe „virtual” goods that let them move up in the games or to give their friends gifts. For instance, in FarmVille, its most popular game, players tend to virtual farms, planting and harvesting crops, and turning little plots of land into ever more sophisticated or idyllic cyberfarms. Good farmers – those who don’t let crops wither – earn virtual currency they can use for things like more seed or farm animals and equipment. But players can also buy those goods with credit cards, PayPal accounts or Facebook’s new payment system, called Credits. A pink tractor, a FarmVille favorite, costs about $3.50, and fuel to power it is 60 cents. A Breton horse can be had for $4.40, and four chickens for $5.60. The sums are small, but add up quickly when multiplied by millions of users: Zynga says it has been profitable since shortly after its founding. At a recent gathering of media and technology moguls, Jeffrey Katzenberg, the C.E.O. of DreamWorks Animation, was asked what he would do if he were to start his career over. „I said I would like to be Mark Pincus,” he recalled in an interview. „He has nailed the next killer app, the next compelling thing that’s going to happen” in media.
IT3 komment: A Facebookról ismert FarmVille és Mafia Wars után júniusban megjelent az online játékpiacot nem egész három éven belül meghódító Zynga harmadik tömegterméke, a FrontierVille. A piacvezető céggel az iparág óriásai közül egyedül az Electronic Arts tartja a lépést, de ők is csak tisztes távolból. Pedig ezek a játékok egyszerűek, grafikájukban nincs semmi különleges, kifinomultnak a legnagyobb jóindulattal sem nevezhetők. A siker főként azzal magyarázható, hogy felismerték a közösségi hálózatokban rejlő szórakoztató potenciált (és a szórakoztatás hiányát), illetve a „hosszú farok” elvét alkalmazva és korábbi példákból tanulva, rájöttek, miként tehetnek szert komoly profitra virtuális javak eladásából.
Forrás: www.nytimes.com
