Zynga and the End of the Beginning (opens in new tab)

Excellent article. The current Zynga model is certainly unsustainable. They've hired Brian Reynolds, which hints at deeper games to come, but what they're doing right now will be ineffective in 6 months.

One thing I've been coming to terms with- just because something makes no sense long term doesn't mean that it's not a valuable course to pursue short term.

If, and it's a big if, Zynga can reinvent itself in the next 6-9 months, then this initial phase was brilliant in that it gave them the resources they needed to move on to real domination. If they don't reinvent themselves, a few people will have made a lot of money, but nothing permanent will have been built. A real opportunity will have been missed.

But they can't keep on the same path, it just won't work a lot longer.

I had a conversation with my 6-year-old cousin where she talked passionately about how much she loved club-penguin. She spoke in detail about all the fun times she'd had, that bits of the santa-costume she'd been trying to find & how all her friends were in one igloo together at one point. She even told me about how she had to go on regularly to keep her pets alive (a very clever trick built-in by the game-designers no-doubt).

Listening to her rant on about it made me realise just how engaging these social games are for younger players. It made me see Disney's acquisition of Club Penguin (http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/08/01/disney-acquires-club-pe...) in an entirely new light.

This article is excellent - anyone interested in social gaming should take 20 minutes to read it. It'll get you totally up to speed on where the industry stands on the eve of 2010.

However, anyone who thinks that Zynga doesn't know all of this is kidding themselves. They saw a temporary situation (novelty of gaming on a hugely growing platform) and attacked it with everything they had. The road will be a lot harder for them in the future, but because of what they did in 2009, they go in with hundreds of millions of users, a strong brand, cheap cost of capital (because they're hot), a ton of cash, and they're probably the only Facebook developer with anything close to leverage on Facebook. They're one of the most aggressive companies out there and they have given no reason to underestimate them.

Having played a few web based games in the past (although thankfully nothing from Zynga) I can attest that the analysis is spot on; for the first few weeks the novelty keeps you there, but after that it becomes dull and you go back to real games.

Also after you've gone through a few of them you seem to get inoculated to the genre.

This article probably takes too many words to make its point, but the analysis is spot-on. Of course that may just be wishful thinking on my part. If Zynga games are anything more than an unsustainable fad then I fear for humanity's future.