10th September 2010, 2:31 PM
![[Image: farmville.jpg]](http://i84.photobucket.com/albums/k33/GreatRumbler/farmville.jpg)
Quote:The company behind Mafia Wars and Farmville doesn't like to talk about the sad addicts who fuel its profits. But it does quietly run a special store for them, where imaginary credits are bought with very real bank transfers.
The minimum purchase in Zynga's underground "Platinum Purchase Program" is $500, payable by wire transfer (see email below). The reward over buying online with your credit card: Extra points with which to buy virtual goods for the company's Facebook games. If you refer a friend to the program, you get even more points. Zynga, meanwhile, gets word of mouth, which is especially important since Zynga keeps this bulk sales program hush hush; it's not mentioned on the company website, nor within its games. If you Google for it, you'll get a few complaints for disgruntled customers and a couple of posts from a blogger named "Loot Lady," who writes that it was "hard to find a lot of information out about this" program.
Well, naturally. With top-drawer partners like Apple and Google, Zynga is not going to be keen to draw attention to how much of its profits come from obsessive online gaming junkies, many of them underaged or low income, like the unemployed disabled man the New York Times discovered was spending 16 hous a day on Zynga's YoVille.
But it is keen to tap the market. Indeed, when it comes to game design, Zynga CEO Mark Pincus has a predatory attitude toward gamers, and has told his programmers that pumping up profits is more important than the experience of actually playing the game, ex employees say in an excellent new SF Weekly cover story. Disillusioned employees have even reportedly given Zynga an unofficial motto: "Do Evil," an inversion of Google's informal slogan "Don't be evil."
Having explicitly aimed to get people addicted to its mindless, low-quality games — SF Weekly writes that titles like Zynga's are built around a "compulsion loop," which sounds about right — Zynga's not just going to leave money on the table. By setting up a non-refundable, bank-to-bank transfer program, as documented in the Zynga email we obtained and have reproduced below, the company can avoid giving a cut of the revenue to credit card companies and processors. More importantly, the program allows gaming addicts to feed their addictions more conveniently; on Facebook Zynga's game stores can top out at $50 or $200 in virtual credit at a time, effectively turning away the company's best customers.
It's not a pretty notion, the idea of grown humans throwing huge quantities of perfectly good money into electronic addictions. Then again, it's not exactly novel one, either. Zynga deserves credit, at the very least, for going with the tried and true solution of keeping its junkie-serving business in the shadows, rather than throwing it onto the open web in some misguided gesture of transparency. Drug dealers have been doing it this way for centuries, with good reason.
http://gawker.com/5634379/the-secret-dea...le-addicts
Quote: In light of Zynga’s phenomenal rise, one former senior employee recalls arriving at the company eager to discover what new business practices were driving its success in a market where other popular Web 2.0 ventures struggled to make money. What was Zynga’s secret? Not long after starting work, he got an answer. It came directly from Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus at a meeting. And it wasn’t what he expected.
“I don’t f**king want innovation,” the ex-employee recalls Pincus saying. “You’re not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers.”
Workers at Zynga were fond of joking (albeit half-seriously) that their firm’s unofficial motto was an inversion of Google’s famous “Don’t Be Evil.”
“Zynga’s motto is ‘Do Evil,’” he says. “I would venture to say it is one of the most evil places I’ve run into, from a culture perspective and in its business approach. I’ve tried my best to make sure that friends don’t let friends work at Zynga.”
“We’ve never before seen this kind of deliberate unconcern for the aesthetics of the experience,” says Ian Bogost, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and founding partner of Persuasive Games. He says Zynga’s market-driven approach to the development of simple but addictive applications is “like strip-mining. They don’t really care about the longevity of the form or the experience. … That sort of attitude is the sort of thing you usually hear about from oil companies or pharmaceuticals. You don’t really hear about it in arts and entertainment.”
One of the more common complaints among former Zynga employees is about Pincus’ distaste for original game design and indifference to his company’s products, beyond their ability to make money. “The biggest problem I had with him was that he didn’t know or care about the games being good — the bottom line was the only concern,” a former game designer says. “While I am all for games making money, I like to think there’s some quality there.”
http://brokentoys.org/2010/09/10/bobby-k...us-exists/
:psyduck: