Zynga.com Making Progress Two Months In

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The Zynga platform started out with around 1.7 million MAU and 130,000 DAU when it launched over beta. In the first week after that MAU grew 11 percent to 1.9 million while DAU went up 38 percent to 180,000 and by the end of the month, Zynga.com was at 2.2 million MAU and 230,000; now at the beginning of April, it’s up to 2.8 million MAU and 420,000 DAU.

The growth of the traffic has all been organic and advertising on the platform will be turned on during this quarter on elements like the Sidebar. “The rest of the module changes depending on where the user is on Zynga.com,” wrote AJ Glasser. “On the homepage or profile page, users see a list of zFriends sorted into those currently online and those that have played Zynga games recently. This part of the module can be toggled to show a list of suggested zFriends — some of which are not on friends with the user on Facebook. In games, the user might see a horizontal list of users that have recently helped them in-game (with links to those users’ profiles) or a live feed of activity from other players of that game. The live feed can be sorted by everyone playing that game at the time or only zFriends that have played the game. The sidebar is also a place where we’ve seen Zynga serve ads via Google AdSense, but this has only occurred when viewing the sidebar in a game that doesn’t make use of the live feed.”

Zynga’s live feed posts in-game requests made by both zFriends and strangers, allowing you to find new friends that will help you more easily. “This is where Zynga.com has seen the most change in the last two months,” wrote Glasser. “At first, when there were fewer users on the platform, the live feed functioned much like the real time Ticker updates on Facebook. Users would click on a game story and receive the rewards attached to that story while also sending the poster the item they’d requested. As has always been the case with Zynga games, each story generated from a request only has a certain number of rewards attached to it — and once they’ve all been distributed, a player can no longer click on that story to receive or send items.”

“As it turns out, supply exceeded demand — more often than not, people were clicking on live feed stories and receiving a message that all the rewards had already been claimed,” he added. “Manuel Bronstein and Reed Shaffner, Zynga.com’s general manager and lead product manager, tell us that the average user clicks on stories in the live feed 200 times per session (they declined to give session lengths — but assuming Zynga.com sessions are comparable to Facebook’s five to 20 minute range, that’s a lot).”

Zynga.com also has a user profile that displays the most-played games, recent games activity, zFriends on the platform and the number of friends the user has helped for the week. “Interestingly, the profile pictures displayed in this module indicate whether a friend is playing games on Zynga.com or on Facebook as all games on Zynga.com are synchronous with Facebook canvas. Facebook friends have a Facebook icon on the bottom of their profile picture while Zynga.com friends do not. Both players will receive an icon in the upper part of their profile picture indicating which platform game they’ve played most recently (no game icon seems to mean that user hasn’t played a Zynga game). Nowhere else on the site does Zynga.com differentiate between platform and Facebook players,” notes Glasser. “Lastly, the profile page is another venue where Zynga has explored serving display ads. So far, we’ve only encountered banner ads for furniture boutique One King’s Lane (which incidentally was co-founded by Alison Pincus, Zynga CEO Mark Pincus’s wife) on our profile page. These appear farther down the page beside the recent games activity feed, often requiring a user to scroll in order to see the entire ad.”

There’s potential in Zynga.com in the way it’s consistent and with Facebook the canvas. “The other thing that seems to be working is the synchronous nature of the platform,” said Glasser. “The counter that appears below Zynga’s logo on the lefthand side of the screen counts the number of users active on the platform concurrently — and refreshes every 60 seconds. That number has gone as high as 1.8 million during our own sessions; Zynga declined to give a specific number. The high demand for items out of the live feed also serves as proof of concept, even if there are some complications in managing demand.”

As far as pitfalls for the platform, “Synchronicity will also be an ongoing challenge for Zynga to manage on its platform, as it comes from an asynchronous background on Facebook and may not be prepared to manage demand across a broad range of systems,” wrote Glasser. “There may be some issues in getting Facebook users to convert to Zynga.com players, on account of users having to approve a new set of permissions in order to use Zynga.com. The way the dialogue appears (see below) may also make less-informed users wary, as they may be confused by giving a company access to their data, versus a specific game.”

“What could really hinder Zynga.com’s growth down the line is discoverability. Facebook itself and many other games networks have struggled with the best way to help users find games, and no one solution has proved perfect. Bronstein says the platform team will consider everything from friend-recommended games and other types of social discovery to ratings systems or other means of sorting. Currently, with just five games on Zynga.com, it’s not a problem the developer has had much time to experiment with solving,” concludes Glasser.

Source: Inside Social Games

EA CEO Shooting For Number One In Social

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Electronic Arts is currently the second largest publisher of games on Facebook. However, to EA CEO John Riccitiello, he wants to put more time and effort into it and become top in the world.

“When it comes to Facebook, while we’re number two, I’d say we’re a distant number two. I mean, the other guys have lapped us three times,” said Riccitiello, referring to Zynga. “We would like to be number one in every possible area, in every geography. That’s a grand ambition. We’re not there yet.”

To Riccitiello, the focus should be on making fun games rather than using data-driven stats to dictate direction. “They’re not really in the entertainment business. I think that will eventually die. Consumers want to be entertained; they don’t want to be data managed,” said Riccitiello.

Source: Morning Edition

App Stores Too Crowded, Says Digital Chocolate CEO

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While digital offerings don’t have to worry about their games not being available, standing out from the crowd is often difficult. Trip Hawkins, CEO of Digital Chocolate, says that developers will have to enlist other means to get attention for their games.

“When Apple launched the iPhone, when Facebook launched their app API, when Android and Google Plus followed suit, you started to see all these offers where ‘Hey, if you’re a developer, just come to me. You don’t need a publisher,'” said Hawkins. “I think that honeymoon is ending now because if you have a million apps in an app store, just because your app is in an app store, it doesn’t mean it’s going to be discovered. So you’ve got issues about how you’re going to bring traffic to it.”

To Hawkins, the solution is for publishers to help with discovery. He was also critical of the cut that app store owners take for digital sales.

“I think for developers increasingly, they’re going to have to try to then figure out, ‘Well how do I get my discovery problem solved ‘ If they can’t finance it themselves, then maybe they need to partner with a publisher that’s good at it,” he said. “Retailers in the old days not only solved the distribution problem, they solved the discovery problem. In the very beginning with iPhone, with Android, with Facebook, they also solved the discovery problem because there wasn’t much there. As you got up into the thousands and thousands of things that are there, they’re no longer solving the discovery problem.”

“They don’t really in fact deserve 30 percent of the value chain anymore,” added Hawkins. “The 30 percent number is kind of arbitrary. That number makes no sense whatsoever anymore.”

Source: Gamasutra

TwitchTV Takes Home Webby

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TwitchTV has won the Webby People’s Voice Award in the “games-related” category. The site focuses on live streaming content related to gaming culture – find out more about TwitchTV in this [a]list interview.

“TwitchTV is extremely community focused in terms of listening to our users in order to ensure the most accessible and compelling streaming experience,” said Emmett Shear, CEO of TwitchTV. “It’s because of this relationship with our partners and spectators that we have this groundswell of support. This Webby Award would not have been possible without our dedicated broadcasters and the millions of viewers who have made TwitchTV what it is today, so we are thankful for their support.”

The Unfinished Swan Teaser

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The Unfinished Swan will feature unique gameplay elements such as using paint to uncover your surroundings. Guided by a runaway swan, players will journey through the hidden kingdom until they meet the eccentric King that created the realm.

The Best We Can Be: A Princess Peach Musical

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Random Encounters has put together a song “The Best We Can Be: A Princess Peach Musical” showing what would happen if the Princess got political. It’s impressively acted and sung by cosplayer Anji Viper, and there’s a cute little scene after the credits.