Brendon Fredin - Zynga and Failing Success

Analysts warn that Zynga may not find a path back to profitability – Mike Rose – October The social juggernaut is falling.

Between losing experienced executives like Paul and David Bettnerto having another failed fiscal quarter, Zynga is falling on some hard times. The developer of FarmVille, CityVille, and many other social network games seems to be losing their magic touch. Zynga stumbled upon a success when they found a massive untapped market in the casual non-gamer market on Facebook. With the release of FarmVille, Zynga became an over-night success and has become a household name around the world.

Problem is though, is that Zynga went completely overboard with it. They a great idea and simply ran too far with it. Zynga has created way to many games for most people to even keep TRACK of, nonetheless play in a single day half-decently well. Not only that, but a lot of these games are almost EXACT rip-offs of other Facebook games (FarmVille and Farm City, Mafia Wars and Mob Wars etc…) Zynga has been shoving unwanted and unwarranted content down the consumers throat for a while now. There were no complaints about lack of content or lack of options. All it does is simply paint a bad picture for Zynga.

Zynga has made a mistake a fair amout of developers have made over the lifespan of the gaming industy and that is pushing profits over players. Players equal profit. Happy players equal greater profit. By having this newfound success hit them square in the bank account, they lost sight of reality and logic and started pushing for profit. It really isn't working for them either in or . Zynga seems to be falling into a pit that is becoming harder to get out of.

Zynga needs to take a step back and see this from the consumers perspective. The playerbase is seeing this expansion not as more options for entertainment. They are seeing this as an exploitation of their wallets through the guise of flashy colours and cutesy characters. Instead of focusing to make a few games and to make them well, Zynga has focused on making many medicore games all basically clones of each other and sharing many of the same traits.  If Zynga can see this, appeal to the dedicated players instead of the masses, and focus on making a few fantastic games instead of flooding us with medicore options, Zynga has an incredible chance to re-capture their success.