Game Over: Zynga Shuts Down PetVille And 10 Other Titles

http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/30/zynga-shuts-down-petville-fishville-mafia-wars-2/

by chrisacky • 14 years ago

178 140 14 years ago

twiceaday• 14 years ago

Good.

You know what the right play on Zynga was? Cashing out and putting the money elsewhere. Instead, Zynga is the classic case of thinking that growth is basically infinite and there is unlimited demand. There are a limited number of gamers willing to buy virtual goods on Facebook games, and there is nothing special that Zynga does on mobile that other companies don't do as well or better.

Take the money and run. Now it might be too late.

ojbyrne• 14 years ago

Isn't that what upper management did? At least to the extent legally possible.

loceng• 14 years ago

Well, can't really know for sure, though from the outside it didn't really look like there was much innovation outside the addictive game model they first implemented. And then they got into defensive mode buying up competitors / talent, however individual developers can always do things cheaper and create breakaway games that will slowly take from the pie.

Tloewald2• 14 years ago

Were they in any way connected with kingdom of loathing? If not, then their only innovation was integrating kingdom of loathing with nicer graphics and facebook (i.e. not the game mechanics or business model).

jkat• 14 years ago

I'm a big gaming fan, and it seems like they could have explored and expanded the world of casual gaming; but they instead focused on a cash grab.

hdra• 14 years ago

yeah... good ol' times where I associated casual games with companies such as Playfish instead of Zynga... You know, Zuma, Diner Dash, Sally's Salon.. Where the companies doesn't actually try to get you addicted to their games..

pebb• 14 years ago

Time to issue stock buyback to return money to shareholders and shut the company down.

robertelder• 14 years ago

I started playing farmville over a year ago to learn about what made Zynga so successful. Farmville is the lowest quality game I have ever seen. For a while, every time you loaded the game there was a php array of what looked like debug information echoed to the page just before the game loaded. There were numerous times where I would queue up a bunch of work in the game, only to get a message saying that "Farmville has been enhanced, please refresh to continue". Refreshing the page would mean I have to click on all those trees again. Every time you load the game you need to close about 5 promotional offers attempting to get you to buy farm cash, or invite your friends to play the game. The game employs emotionally manipulative tactics to get people to use farm cash (in game currency you pay for). Every once in a while you will get a pop up with a picture of a sad horse which needs shelter. It will run away if you don't feed him now! There are also a lot of annoying promotions that pop up and you are not given the option dismiss them. The only button provided is "Start now" or "Tell me more...". The game if full of bugs, and occasionally has pop up windows that have no text and empty buttons. I attempted to log in for the first time in 4 months today, and I could not play the game because it lags so bad despite my having a new computer. To be fair my map has all possible spaces filled with lime trees, so that is where the lag comes from.

samstave• 14 years ago

I respect your efforts. It would be great to see a spectrum analysis of all their games in this way, if for nothing more than to show, holistically, how bad of a company Zynga is...

To be fair, I'd like to see the same for the KixEye games as well - as they are making money hand over fist (according to a good friend who works there).

slig• 14 years ago

See "What I Learned From FarmVille - So You Don’t Have To Play It" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1940778

justinhj• 14 years ago

In my experience Zynga have amongst the most polished of the social games. I've encountered occasional bugs but nothing like you're describing here. If what you describe is typical how do you explain their huge audience?

alexholehouse• 14 years ago

With these kinds of games I really surprised Zynga didn't provide a more graceful wind down. As the article suggests, there must be HUGE numbers of people with real emotional attachment to their characters/pets, who almost by definition are Zynga's most loyal customers. SURELY a business decision which exclusively hurts those who are stakeholders in the games you produce is, from a long term perspective, just a horrible move for customer loyalty and reputation.

If I'd put 4 years into a pet on Petville, only to have the game basically deleted from under my nose, there is no way I'd ever become involved in anything Zynga does again.

[Disclaimer, I've never actually played any Zynga games, so this is based on second hand conversions/observations]

general_failure• 14 years ago

Most of the comments are made up.

patio11• 14 years ago

It's possible that some of these games had paying user retention numbers such that maintaining customer loyalty among the holdouts was not a hard requirement. I don't have a convenient way to look up MAUs at the moment, but many apps languish at say 10k. That would imply a few hundred paying customers. The majority of them would be worth whole tens of dollars in LTV.

One of my rare compliments to Zynga: they aren't stupid and it is highly, highly unlikely that the live teams' business analysts made a worse decision based on the data than an outsider would make based on a press release.

robryan• 14 years ago

I think it would be a straight numbers decision as you guess. A lot of companies would worry about how this would impact those high value and long term customers and how it could effect retention in other games and future projects. I think Zynga is passed that point now though (if that ever was a concern for them, they have never really been a games company a rational person would have a strong connection to).

Pretty much all the big name MMOs released in the past 10 years have gracefully downsized and maintained maintenance for the player base.

Too2• 14 years ago

Not only 4 years, probably plenty of money also.

raganwald• 14 years ago

The article was amazingly sympathetic to Zynga's management. Almost as if... Hmmm... Almost as if... Someone sent them a press release and they reprinted it verbatim in exchange for an exclusive interview or an advertising buy.

ChuckMcM6• 14 years ago

Now now, are you saying coverage on Tech Crunch can be bought? I'm shocked I tell you, shocked!

SimHacker• 14 years ago

"Your winnings, sir." (Transfers 1,000,000 Facebook credits to Tech Crunch's account.)

saosebastiao• 14 years ago

I thought it was pretty jarring. If there is anything the world should be able to agree on, it is that Pincus is an insufferable * and a terrible manager.

saraid2166• 14 years ago

Well, it's been reported that he has tear ducts and occasionally uses them.

kitcar• 14 years ago

Any thoughts as to why they didn't sell the titles rather than shuttering them? I'm thinking maybe they share code across games and don't want it in outside hands, or maybe they weren't revenue positive, or perhaps don't want to hand over any portion of their user database to a competitor. Any other ones I am missing?

anatari• 14 years ago

Because it makes very little business sense to do so. The upside of selling is near zero because it would not make a dent in their bottom line or their future outlook, while there are many downsides to selling, some of which you have mentioned.

mistercow3• 14 years ago

>But Zynga’s share price got decimated over the past year.

Well no, not really. I mean, yes, I guess it technically did. Then it got decimated again. And then it got decimated 12 more times.

monochromatic11• 14 years ago

I feel like I'm fighting a losing battle with "decimate." Glad to see there's somebody else on HN still fighting the good fight though.

hnriot• 14 years ago

What are you trying to say? The word was used quite correctly.

michaelhoffman• 14 years ago

The battle was lost hundreds of years before you were born. The Oxford English Dictionary lists the first quotation for the loose "to destroy or remove a large proportion of" meaning of "decimate" in 1663.

recursive• 14 years ago

What's the battle? I'm seeing two definitions:

1. Kill, destroy, or remove a large percentage of. 2. Drastically reduce the strength or effectiveness of (something): "plant viruses that can decimate yields".

koide7• 14 years ago

Now that your position has been decimated by history, you could focus your efforts on one of my pet peeves that's been appearing a lot on HN: "binary blob"

Type either "blob" or "binary lob." PLEASE!

bcj• 14 years ago

Yes, and geeks are circus freaks, computers are people who make calculations, and manufacturing means "made by hand".

Language is constantly evolving, especially as it pertains to words taken from other languages.

andrewcooke• 14 years ago

"Zynga’s share price is down 3.52% to $2.33 from its $10 IPO price a year ago"

???

mmahemoff• 14 years ago

slight oversight there. From the comments:

Should be 76.7%. 3.52% was the amount it was down on Friday, December 28th, 2012.

uptown2• 14 years ago

decimated...

ChuckMcM6• 14 years ago

As an operations guy I find this really interesting. What I find interesting is the cost vs revenue of these games.

Obviously to me there is a bunch of up front costs, art assets, game play design, etc. But once you've got the basic HTML5 code going, and the art assets in place, what are your on-going costs?

Clearly there is going to be bandwidth at scale its like $2 - $3 per megabit per month, you've got power/cooling in a colo, so that's going to cost you maybe $3K/month for a 42U rack's worth of servers. And presumably you've got a couple of opsen types tending and feeding that rack. But they are split across say 100 racks so 1/100th of their salary/benefits per month, lets call it $160/month [1]. So lets give the game 500Mbits of bandwidth a month (that is 4.3TB of data transfer per day) We can put 20 beefy servers in our 42U rack with 20TB of disk space and 1/2TB of flash in each (we do this at Blekko)So 400TB of disk space and 10TB of flash, and if you wanted 3.8TB of RAM (192GB/server) and 480 threads of execution.

Now I'm making a huge assumption here, and so I'm calling it out, but my assumption is that the "game" is essentially a front end on a database, where player actions become database transactions, and those transactions show up as changes in the game 'world', further those transactions are both shared (everyone in the game can see them) and private (only you see the changes). So a system that is slightly less beefy than our setup (the Sun setup) gets 10M transactions/minute in the TPC-C benchmark [2]. At that level it suggest our stack-o-servers might support 1 - 2M players.

So our monthly cost is on the order of $6,500 and we're hosting say 1.5M players. That means we need to extract something like a half cent per month out of those players in order to pay for running the hardware. For a gross margin of 50% that is about .86 cents.

I may be completely off here somewhere, please point out my math or configuration errors! It seems like one could essentially run a game 'forever' until that average number got too low and then you would have to wind it down, but one wonders about how hard it is get get someone to pay a penny a month.

I did leave out the maintenance (warranty) cost of the servers, a recent quote from a server vendor had 'everything covered, onsite tech' for $175/server/month. So if you wanted to add that in then there would be another $3,500/month to cover.

It looks like a license to print money but clearly there is something here that sucks all that money away. Curious what it is.

[1] That is two ops people with a combined salary/benefit package costing $200K/year or 16K/month which divided by 100 (1/100th of their work) is $160.

[2] http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_perf_results.asp?result...

KC8ZKF2• 14 years ago

You are overlooking opportunity costs. All of your players could be playing a more profitable game instead.

ChuckMcM6• 14 years ago

Ok, so you're saying I need to measure this stack against another game that I could ship on this stack. So leaving it generating revenue $X is a loss of additional revenue $Y-$X if I deployed a game that had $Y revenue on the same hardware. Does that about cover it?

The assumption in that though is that game $Y cannibalizes $X. Which is to say if you also release a new game $Y your returns on $X go away.

And while I see that as true with similar/derivative games "CashVille 2" is just like "CashVille 1" but with unicorns or something, I am not sure I'm persuaded that we do accrue an opportunity cost against different game. This is the root of the reasoning in my print money comment.

The reasoning is that if this config pays for the development cost and then generates marginal $ over time, you just add another stack to increase the marginal dollars you get. A writer releasing a second book doesn't 'cut into' sales of the first book, if nothing else they can sometimes increase the revenue of the first book by getting wider visibility.

I'm interested though in how we might reason about the opportunity cost here.

andrewfelix• 14 years ago

Good point, these games are competing with each other. I think Starbucks ran into this problem in the late 90's.

orionblastar3• 14 years ago

There are other factors to consider.

Zynga had copied ideas from competitors, wasn't Cityville a Sims rip-off? Not only that but competitors were ripping off Zynga ideas as well.

I understand the need to constantly change the game to attract new customers and sell new items to the existing customers. I had played Playdom's Marvel Avenger's Alliance, but recently quit because the bugs were very serious and each new thing they added created problems in the PvP mode as well as more bugs. In order to be competitive in that game you need to buy gold to buy rare items on sale for a limited time. My problem was that they have a "Maintenance"/Refresh bug and after I bought gold and paid $20 that I was not given the gold by the game. I filed a tech support ticket with Playdom over it and gave them my Facebook account name and Paypal address. They just ignored it for weeks. Eventually I had to file a complaint with Paypal for not receiving goods that I paid for and was awarded $20 in my dispute with Playdom. Then a few weeks later Playdom had my Facebook account banned claiming "unauthorized credit card use" but that was not the case, it was failure to deliver goods paid for. After trying to resolve the issue with Facebook and Playdom, I eventually quit and removed the game from my profile. I refuse to play any more Playdom or any of its competitors because of bugs so serious that you don't get what you paid for, and they refuse to give you what you paid for or refund your money. I heard from other players that Zynga does that as well. Basically it comes down to this, if they ignore the request for a refund for 30 or 60 days, Paypal or the credit card/debit card company cannot issue a refund after a certain amount of time after the transaction.

I have never in my life seen such buggy software as these so called online social network games. I have never seen such sh*tty tech support as these online social networking games. I'll bet that this is what affects their profit margin, once users get burned in buying premium content they will either play the game without buying anything else, or they will like me quit playing from that company or all companies.

ryguytilidie• 14 years ago

It's quite an assumption to think that after playing petville for 2 years and seeing the plug pulled, these people will be flocking to other Zynga games.

ihsw2• 14 years ago

There is a fine line between maintaining the current player-base and attracting new players, and the money in both is fast and hard to come by (however the latter is more exciting).

It would be an unfortunate charity to give little to no attention to attracting new players but instead letting the current player-base stagnate, and it's troublesome to keep assigning hard-working developers and artists to maintain the slow and steady decline of a game.

Make no mistake; killing off the stagnating games is in the best interest of the artists and game developers in the same way that it is financially sane.

ChuckMcM6• 14 years ago

Sounds like you have some better first hand knowledge here, tell me is there no situation in which you just 'run' the game and artists and game developers are no longer involved?

This is a critical point for me. I was a huge World of Warcraft fan, played a lot, and would still play a lot if it wasn't a complete waste of time :-) I also play 'Settlers of Catan.' (SoC) I've played SoC since it came out, and while it has had a couple of expansions, I don't play them, I still play the original. Once I got the box and tiles and cards there was no additional participation of any game designers or artists. The game continues to grab followers, the marginal cost of shipping a new one is some injection molded plastic and printed cardboard.

Why aren't there computer games like SoC ?

Fargren• 14 years ago

I've worked for one of Zynga's competitors, and you are omitting one significant cost. It is vital for these games to add content monthly if not weekly, and these games are released with a large number of known bugs that are slowly fixed through the games lifetime. I'd say that any of these games, once released has at least two programmers and three artists working almost exclusively on bug fixing and adding features. Last game I worked on we had three programmers working on the client full time on it, two programmers doing occasional work on the backend and three artists creating assets for at least five months after release. I quit about this time, but my guess is this expenses went on for at least a year.

n3rdy• 14 years ago

Wouldn't cutting off support and updates for the game be a better alternative than shutting it down though? If someone is hooked on the game, they won't care much for new updates.

If they get bored, they find a new game to play. As long as the game is at least profitable, run it until it isn't.

The only other reason for closing a game prematurely like this would be to minimize people complaining about the lack of support for a game, which could translate to "Zynga sucks, they haven't added anything in months, clearly they've stopped caring about their customers!" by players who either forgot about or didn't get the memo.

chris_wot• 14 years ago

Games have a maintenance burden which you haven't factored into the equation. This maintenance requires effort, time and money. Sounds like Zynga was stretched too thin, and had bought too many companies without really working out what the ongoing costs would be.

sanarothe• 14 years ago

This is really sketch, in my opinion; There are people with hundreds of dollars invested into their facebook game microtransactions. "Take the money and run" to a whole new level...

pixie_2• 14 years ago

They need to figure out a way to persist these games. Either sell them off, or open source them or something. It makes me rage when companies lock in users to a game and shutdown the servers.

phaus3• 14 years ago

Their games pretty much amount to marginally interactive spam. I don't think that too many people who are smart enough to code would be willing to put in the effort to continue developing them, because the games don't have enough depth to capture an intelligent person's attention.

Also, it's doubtful that the company would be interested in open sourcing them, because they don't really care about gaming or gamers, they just saw a quick way to make money.

There's nothing wrong with having money be your top priority (to each their own) but in Zynga's case it's obvious that it's their only priority.

pixie_2• 14 years ago

You really don't see anything wrong with making money a top priority? Forgoing all other responsibilities. Do you believe a company should be responsible for more than just profits?

Jare• 14 years ago

Zynga has actually open sourced a bunch of stuff. Nothing earth shattering, but there's good stuff there. See https://github.com/zynga and their tech blog http://code.zynga.com/

alan_cx• 14 years ago

So, these are virtual pets and what-not, that people have kept "alive" and happy for years, right?

So, is it really that hard to port the player's data in to a stand alone desk top application that at least the character can sort of be preserved in, or more? Perhaps let the open source minded folk perhaps keep "feeding" the application? Or something like that. I would imagine that players would be happy enough to pay a reasonable amount for that. Or perhaps do a data dump for players so that some representation of the character exists.

I kinda think developers should have something like this in mind before they start, especially where kids and money are concerned.

zacharycohn2• 14 years ago

That's nice from the human interest angle, but when it comes down to it Zynga is a publicly traded company now. I don't recall if they're profitable or not at the moment, but they are hemorrhaging shareholder trust.

They could either spend more time (and money) on letting people port their virtual corn to a local machine.. or they could cut the product and immediately start moving toward profitability.

When your stock price is $2.33... it really isn't much of a choice.

djt3• 14 years ago

They may be doing this to switch customers to their other titles before a new competitors game comes out

atesti• 14 years ago

Of course what Zynga created cannot really be respected as or compared with proper games, but it's still sad that it's gone. How will the Moma put games like Farmville (which are an important piece of history of computers and FaceBook and stock markets) in an exhibition once the servers have been turned off?

Makes one really want to buy Sim City 5 (which will do calcuations in the cloud and not be playable without internet connection). Today EA shut down games like Fifa 2011!

hornbaker• 14 years ago

If you're a dev with Flash experience from the PetVille team looking for an opportunity with a much smaller (but profitable) company, please get in touch with me. Remote work ok.

lucian303• 14 years ago

Yeah, predictable three ... now four years ago. Zynga and the rest. Can you say bubble burst when FB finally goes down?

Game Over: Zynga Shuts Down PetVille And 10 Other Titles

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