Zynga has sometimes received some criticism for it’s top-down, confrontational managerial style. While the company seeks to define itself away from Facebook and faces criticism from investors, Zynga founder Mark Pincus explained the company culture.
“An important, fundamental part of our culture is that we think that every person in the company should feel like a principal, an owner, a founder of this vision,” said Pincus. “They should challenge the vision, the mission, the strategy, and the values. Sometimes we change the values based on those challenges, and sometimes we need our teams to call out that we are not living up to those values.”
“Our No. 1 value is that we are making products that we love, that we think us and our friends and family want to play,” he added. “The first thing I say to new hires is that if you are working on a game and you don’t feel connected to it or love for it, don’t be embarrassed to talk about it.”
Pincus hopes with this philosophy, it will lead the company back to the audiences it had a year ago. “The promise of games for everyday people is still so much greater than the experience that everyone has today,” offered Pincus. “The overall tectonic shifts that are going on in games and more broadly in media are that everything is moving to becoming free, social and accessible. But we’re just at the beginning of that. We can get to a day where short-session play can enhance, if not replace text messaging as a way to stay in touch with people.”
As far as working on other platforms that aren’t PC, he said, “I still believe that we can offer you a much deeper, more engaging, more compelling play experience on a PC than we can on a mobile device, but one can enhance the other and one can expand the other. I don’t think they necessarily will compete with each other, just like how we find a place for movies in our lives, and TV and radio. The same will be true between a handset a tablet and a PC.”
On the relationship with Facebook, Pincus said, “It has been hugely positive for us, for Facebook and for both of our consumers. Facebook has been an incredible catalyst, an accelerator, of social gaming and of other industries. And we are appreciative of that and we think that we helped see a significant catalyst for engagement on their own platform, and now on iPhone as well.”
Source: AP
