While Zynga has all the appearances of a game company, Zynga Beijing general manager Andy Tian described the company as a web-based company first. Like Amazon and Google, they focus on metrics like reach, retention, and revenue, all things gathered after the launch of the game.

“The biggest part of game development is after launch. In May 2009, the features of FarmVille were really elementary, but the total number of features has grown 10 times by today. Every week we will push to update our content, said Tian. “Of course if you don’t update it, the life cycle can only last two to three months. So in any of our games we are constantly updating and adding new features.”

“Without tracking, we cannot learn. We want to make sure that a lot of people think something is fun, but we also want to achieve commercial success, not something the development team thinks is cool. This tells you what players really like. Because they may not like the same thing you like,” he said. “The game industry is not art, it’s a craft. So we need the user support. We need to know what the users really like and we have to know what is the root cause for declines in performance. A good designer asks metrics good questions. We have to know how to drive better performance. The best course is not always intuitive. There is no ‘before the metrics’ — it’s are you set up to listen to it If we have three ideas, we can try all three ideas in the game.”

How you are actually going to do it, and follow a path and what should be the speed you should implement something, all have to be based on metrics, he said. “A good social feature should align with one of the three key metrics. If you do not increase at least one of the metrics, you will know that you are not increasing your commercial success. It should be increased at gaining more users. It should be aimed at revenue generation. And thirdly you need to pay attention to virality — one-to-one and one-to-many.”

Source: Gamasutra