Today during a panel on disruptive game platforms at GDC’s GamesBeat, a panel of gaming execs took the stage to talk about the current situation in gaming. The standout speaker so far has been hi5 President and CTO Alex St. John, who has not pulled any punches in his criticisms of Facebook and other companies. Moments ago, he just attacked Zynga, calling its games mediocre and saying that its success stemmed from spamming users.
Here’s what he said (paraphrased): “Zynga makes mediocre games. What Zynga discovered is that Facebook had left an opening for spam. They acquired a lot of audience from a security loophole that Facebook has since closed. And they aren’t social. Their only social game is Poker — it’s the only one that you can chat in. All subsquent games are turn based and spread over days.”
The audience’s response? A round of clapping.
Earlier in the panel, St. John said that Facebook was somewhat schizophrenic, offering users both more professional features and gaming. Of course, hi5 is now a dedicated gaming platform, so he isn’t exactly an unbiased observer.
standing up clapping … thank you!
Thats the pot calling the kettle black.
He wrote on this subject last week: http://www.industrygamers.com/news/facebook-games-from-zynga-are-parasitic-says-alex-st-john/
“Zynga Is Mediocre. It Isn’t Social, ” — I say wtf, and what does that make out of Hi5? a social networking god site? gee… its starting to even stink like MySpace..
Zynga is so hot now and it even has plans to go public along with FB at the stocks market.
Says the president of a company who spams me with email even though i’m not even a member of the site.
I love how he calls zynga spam, when it took me forever to get myself off hi5′s mailing list. He’s got a bit of pot/kettle action going there.
Wait, did the President of Hi5- Hi5?!?!- just call another company spammy? That’s frakkin’ pendulous.
good use of frakkin’
good use of pendulous
Er? This sounds a little..sour grapesque to me.
Obviously,Farmville is a mediocre game… deep gameplay and social interaction is not neccessarily what makes a casual game popular or successful. Farmville has a niche market and it hits it well. Time/item management, collecting, achievements… that mixture seems to be working for them. What’s so bad about turn based games, anyways?
I’ve tried Farmville… not really my thing, but still… I read Zynga also raised a million bucks for Haiti through Farmville. So I guess they’re doing alright by spamming users.
Farmville “niche”???? 84 million plus active daily players is far beyond niche. WOW is niche compared to that.
I’ve de-friended people because of these spammy games. What does it also say about these people who see no problem in spamming other people’s walls with “level up” alerts in mafia wars and “have you seen my blue cow” in Farmville? It tells me a bunch and all of it negative.
or you could just hide the applications update… just sayin’.
When Alex was WildTanget and attending Casual Connect (the gaming conference for casual games) he would always go for the jugular of some competitor or company.
I think he is upset that after $60 million of VC money in WildTanget and 5 different business models, they only came up with “Wild Coins”.
30 million daily active users of Farmville do all the talking.
For perspective, according to Comscore, the WildTangent Network is the number one largest gaming network (on the planet) by audience for several months running, beating out Real, BigFish, Pogo and EA.
84 million
Although I think Zynga was saying they had 100 million monthly uniques which blows away most people’s numbers by far…
I heard it was 1 billion ;-)
yeah, they’re now bigger than Facebook itself!
Jason said DAU, not MAU.
@igniman – 84 million is the “monthly” active users / 30 million is the “daily” active users.
Wild Tangent, Oh, that’s right, the old internet days, it was installed automatically with AOL’s download on their free CD.
I could never get rid of it even when removing AOL so reinstalled the OS and never used AOL again- pot/kettle program as mentioned above.
I think WildTangent always did pretty well, despite their revolving door of business models.
…and thats when the fight started
neat!
Zynga ‘s black hat behaviour is responsible for ruining facebook’s. They aggressively copied every successful game category and spammed to death with the carrot-and-stick method. Not that facebook is not to be blamed here. As a developer, i have been damaged many times by facebook’s continuous shifts in policies which are practically never enforced.
here’s some background on zynga from fellow facebook developers:
http://bit.ly/4Frh51
http://bit.ly/71j4KI
http://bit.ly/pDfPS
http://bit.ly/3lbifZ
http://bit.ly/3NeKlR
http://bit.ly/jvNus
*facebook’s platform, that is.
So a game isn’t social unless it has chat? Doesn’t matter that you need neighbors and lots of them? I’ll agree that Zynga games are very spammy but that is also a social aspect of the games. You notify all your “friends”/neighbors by your spam that you need help and they get rewarded for doing so.
Also if someone is playing Farmville in Facebook then they have chat available to them why should Zynga reimplement chat if it is already provided?
seems the more tc, hi5 and others punch plug zynga the more funding they get.
Call it what he wants, but Zynga has an amazing amount of daily players. Last I checked, the people who receive spam emails don’t keep buying new products daily. Yet people willingly sign in day after day to tend their farms, grow their Mafia, etc.
He can call it mediocre and spammy, but the fact of the matter is that they’ve obviously captured what makes people want to keep playing games. “Social,” “casual” or whatever other labels you want to put on them and whether they are accurate or not, I think I’ve logged more hours on Farmville than I ever did in Final Fantasy VII or Tales of Symphonia (70 and 90 hours, respectively… probably the longest I’ve ever invested in a single traditional game). Call me one hardcore gamer that’s in love with “social” gaming.
I was just at the Flash Game Summit on Monday. I believe it was a guy from Playdom, but he flat out said “The ladder has been knocked away for any company that wants to grow as large as we are” in direct reference to Facebook cancelling notifications.
When even Playdom / Zynga et al are sitting on a panel and saying things like that I would say that there is a lot of credibility to the general opinion that Facebook spam / one-to-many notifications provided the backbone for most of the growth of these companies and that option is no longer available.
Obviously they were using a kind of artificial word of mouth. And just like the fax machine, these games only really work if a bunch of people start playing them right away.
I’d recommend Farmville to anyone. Wait, I have, on multiple occasions. I think it’s a great time waster. I really don’t even care if you become my neighbor, send me gifts, or fertilize my crops.
Alex St. John seems to think that no one would genuinely recommend these games. That’s just not the case. What’s crippling is that with a click of a button, I used to be able to tell everyone that a game met my approval. Now I probably won’t be bothered, other than if anyone asked my advice on what’s fun to do on Facebook.
Th reason he find Poker social is cuz of chat. Ok agreed. Poker belongs to sychronous gaming category and all other games of Zynga are Asynchronous. Async/Sync games can still be social in nature if they follow certain basic characteristics and in case of Zynga games, they do.
I am not sure if Alex St. John understood this basic difference.
He is right though, but only because it takes a spammer to know one. But before critisizing other companies should he not also try to get hi5 back into the social networking game (no pun intended).
I can only second what some people commented – while FarmVille might not be the most intriguing game ever made… The number of monthly users is approximately equal number of people in my country (and that DOES include my mom)! I doubt anyone has done that before. So while I understand _some_ of the criticism I might indeed tend so say I’m spotting some jealousy coming from St. John…
It’s actually rather easy to recruit millions of users on facebook.
Numbers alone don’t mean much. Zynga has always been THE most aggressive player in the platform. Their games have no traction on their own. Look at farmville.com’s traction vs players who play on facebook.
Glad to see someone else in the industry actually saying this publicly.
Whats next? Is Tagged going to put their hat in the ring too? HAHA
Funny thing.. Jumpstart Technologies (spammers) owned Tagged (spammers) before JT was crushed by the FTC & Microsoft.
They also incubated hi5.com..
Out of the mix, hi5 is actually the decent one.
I agree – Zynga is all about spam. So is another great concept, Zumbox – watch out for spam!
If clicking “report app” actually did something… ~sigh.
Yeah it’s a little hard to take this clown from hi5 seriously when his whole business model appears to be built on spamming me via email.
His complaint comes off more like “I’m jealous that I missed the Facebook spam-boat”.
Two things can be equally true: Everyone who’s a gamer knows that Zynga games are mediocre by definition. They’re also wildly popular.
It can’t be a coincidence that many of hi5′s games are derivative of Zynga’s. How ironic then that St. John gets up and cries “Zynga is mediocre!”
“Look… me and the McDonald’s people got this little misunderstanding. See, they’re McDonald’s… I’m McDowell’s. They got the Golden Arches, mine is the Golden Arcs. They got the Big Mac, I got the Big Mick. We both got two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles and onions, but their buns have sesame seeds. My buns have no seeds.”
+1 on the Coming to America reference. You sir deserve rose pedals at your feet and 20 royal bath washers.
Spamming is not sustainable. The fact that zynga’s games continues to grow and users are returning shows that it is not just spamming. Zynga are well known for taking advantage of their data/metrics.
Maybe this hi5 guy should look at why hi5 failed before he starts to bad mouth others with no basis on facts.
Exploiting loopholes = getting rich. Always has, always will. He can be a hater and be bitter, but that doesn’t move money from Zynga’s bank account into hi5′s. It really doesn’t matter, from a business standpoint, if the games are mediocre, what matters is if they have market share.
Thats not true. Exploiting loopholes = increases visibility. its good for marketing, but has nothing to do with selling their products, which is where Zynga makes their money.
It is a huge step from having tons of users to actually getting them to buy your products. Zynga excels at selling its products.
Exploiting loopholes is not nearly enough to get users to stay and purchase items in the game.
i LOVE the zygna GAMES
i could care less about FACEBOOK
zygna needs a zygna.com for games only and not have to use useless facebook just to get in a play the games
zygna needs to totally separate from social networking sites that are nothing but gossip and spam and more
Will
spoken like a true frustrated competitor.
Whether you call it advertisement or spam at last that was fairer to small developers than Hi5′s latest console like god approach where they decide whether your game is worthy of their platform. Fabulous, we now replace having to do our advertising (which facebook just made harder on us) with some relic like this CTO deciding what games live and what games die. Sort of like having a T-Rex offer to get rid of the dog who might bite you so you don’t get hurt.
Guess their CTO relic hasn’t been watching how Nintendo is getting buried by mobile phones more open to devleopers.
The drawing point – the winning attribute of zynga’s games (and social games in the future) is that they are spread over days… Think about it, would you want to have to get your friends to play with you at a set time? Instead of forcing the user to conform to the system, the system should conform to the fact that users log on at different times…. I have to admit, even though zynga IS the king of spam, this guy really does sound like a bitter competitor…
C’mon, this is just a guy who’s known for drumming up PR for his “latest new thing” by saying something controversial. Not that I like Zynga much, but saying they aren’t a social game is just him hoping to drum up biz for a social network we don’t care about.
It has always annoyed me that Zynga are labeled as pioneers of a “social gaming revolution”, playing hearts on msn gaming zone is more social and they started over 10 years ago.