Mark Pincus谈行业创新编辑本段回目录
作者：Steve Peterson
Zynga董事长兼首席执行官Mark Pincus鲜少接受采访，这是他目前最详尽的采访内容。下面主要围绕Zynga和游戏话题，以及Zynga所面临的机遇。
据福布斯数据显示，Mark Pincus是美国第256大富豪，身价高达18亿美元。他是位连环创业者，在Zynga之前曾创建过若干技术公司。他拥有沃顿商学院经济学院的学士学位，以及哈佛商学院的MBA学位。
他于2007年携手他人共同创建了Zynga，伴随Facebook在那段时期内的迅猛发展，Zynga也获得迅速成长。Zynga目前的市值约是36亿美元；相比之下，EA投身行业30年后的市值也只有37亿美元。Zynga游戏目前有近2.5亿的月活跃用户（游戏邦注：包括Facebook、移动设备及Zynga.com平台）。Zynga于2011年12月16日上市；截止3月，公司股票价格升至每股14多美元，而目前的股价却已跌至5美元以下。
Zynga的迅猛发展让公司遭遇许多批评声音，同时也获得许多忠实玩家。公司遭受的批评包括，模仿他人作品，未能提高股票价格，投身下坡市场。Zynga继续引入新游戏，将市场扩展至移动平台，结果如何，且让我们静候公司下周即将公布的收益报告。
Mark Pincus from venturebeat.com
我们上周有幸在旧金山的GamesBeat会议采访了Mark Pincus，就在他宣布大会正式开始之后。
我参加了Zynga Unleashed大会，在我意识到大会演讲并非瞄准投资者后，Zynga的股票出现小幅下跌。
我在大厅遇到来自Lazard和Baird的两位分析师，他们表示，令他们感到有趣的是，与会分析师都非常乐观，没有参加会议的分析师则持消极态度。
有些分析师表示，Zynga的股票下跌是由于Facebook的糟糕表现。你觉得这是部分原因吗？
这并非我锁定的主要参数。我们主要瞄准的是我在台上谈及的内容。我主要思考如何创建一个可扩展、可重复的庞大市场，如何将数亿用户带入游戏中，将内容变得具有社交性，留住用户，促进用户进行转换，推进交叉推广，创造新类型内容。这是我的主要参照标准，这是我认为有趣的地方及未来1-3年将有利于投资者的内容。我不认为花时间阅读分析报告及试着弄清为什么他人不喜欢我们的股票是最有价值的事情。
我积极服务于当前股民和未来投资者。我希望投资者觉得，Zynga是项不错的投资，最佳投资选择是这些新兴发展类型，及西方市场的免费模式游戏和社交游戏。我对于这一未来满怀信心，投资者需要决定他们是否认同我对于所有这些内容的乐观态度。若他们也持积极态度，那么他们就需要决定我们是否是他们的最佳投资选择。
社交游戏也许已达到稳定水平；据comScore表示，Facebook在美国的访问量在过去几个月持平稳状态。我们是否达到“Facebook高峰”，若是如此，这对Zynga来说意味着什么？
我想你多半听到过Facebook谈及这一话题。这里存在大数定律：星球上只有这么多人类，美国只有这么多人口，所以当所有用户都注册Facebook，我们很难看到显著的新用户增长。我认为未来的市场机会主要存在于推动新的体验机会，促使游戏更具社交性的新型游戏机制（游戏邦注：这是最有效的发展驱动因素），以及植入更多存在于硬核游戏和MMO游戏多年的游戏机制。
未来5年我们面临的部分机遇在于，如何包装这些内容，确保它们配合小屏幕、小范围注意广度的形状因素，以及不会阅读指南的用户，同时确保内容准入门槛要低且又不乏深度。我认为这一机遇将持续创新——这是种新型创新。
这不会达到带来下个“公会”的程度，这更多涉及将类似公会的东西打造成非公会的元素，这就像是个你妈妈能够参加的茶话会。各公司可以通过许多不同方式把握这里的游戏机会；我们想要变成用户和大众市场。所以我们对于能够联系用户的游戏非常感兴趣，而非分割彼此的狭隘游戏。
通常你们的游戏都覆盖相当广泛的用户群体，你们着眼于能够带来尽可能多用户的游戏和题材。这是否依然是你们的目标，或者在你看来，瞄准狭隘群体的游戏题材是否存在发展机会？
二者都存在机会。我认为免费模式存在巨大发展空间。通过免费模式，我们降低门槛，这里的首要障碍是掏钱，第二个障碍是实体性，无论这是下载内容，还是盒装游戏，但这是我的个人观点。我认为行业最大的机会在于促使诸如我之类的玩家体验游戏。我是个潜在玩家；之所以是潜在的是因为我太忙了，我腾不出时间。但若你能够将游戏放到我目前，将游戏提炼成5分钟内就能吸引我的内容，我能够同朋友和他人共同体验，那么我就会进行体验。内容需要形式简单，回合简短，时间跨度较长。
CityVille from aingames.com
我认为有种心理状态蕴藏着新的大众市场机会——在此网络中，你可以获得像我侄子之类的玩家，他们是《光晕3》到《魔兽世界》的忠实玩家，但他们也玩《CityVille》。同时在此网络中，你获取我妈妈、Michael Arrington（游戏邦注：TechCrunch的前任编辑）之类的玩家，我锁定年长群体和忙碌人士。过去他们认为游戏枯燥乏味，如今他们也开始体验内容。你知道吗？他们手中有足够资金。这对他们来说算不上什么。我猜想，对Alec Baldwin来说，在游戏中花钱完全没什么大不了。我认为自己并没有传达出正确观念，这主要源自于大家对于游戏行业的既有看法，但我对此的看法和电子商务相同。我将此看作是网页或移动平台机会。
在我看来，这降低了游戏的准入门槛，将此变成全民体验，我觉得除引进新市场外，它还带来各种网络效应，将游戏变得更有趣。所有人都在玩游戏，这简直棒极了。这变成一个文化话题，就像是所有人都在观看和讨论《权力的游戏》，这令《权力的游戏》变成文化内容，而非仅是电视节目。这是我所着迷的文化基因，这是我们作为一家公司所追求的东西。
Zynga.com之所以能够取得当前成绩是因为平台带来基于游戏的串联沟通。基于你的社交网络制作游戏的理念能够带来庞大用户基础。
这是个沙盒效应。我们将Zynga.com视作我们网络的前端，在此我们能够立即尝试所有内容，快速向前迈进，更快进行创新。所以团队因首次能够接触到这些网络层面的机制而颇受启发。在Unleashed大会上，团队展示头碰头的多人同步体验，我们将此作为能够插入街机游戏，而非仅是《泡泡射击》的小部件。这是若干能够让所有玩家进行头碰头游戏的代码行。
我们非常注重社交游戏的深度。这并非众多游戏体验的部分要素；这是我们所追求的目标。我们通过zFriends机制的尝试只是触及皮毛，我们积极尝试各种不同方式，旨在让你逐步积累有趣的个人资料。这可以是基本信息，方便其他人了解你——他们也许是并不清楚你游戏角色的好友。这些游戏存在许多促进更好了解彼此的方式（游戏邦注：如《卡坦岛》）。它们赋予我们另一种表达方式。
作为游戏设计师和社交游戏设计师，我们的部分职责有点像是万圣节派对或是化妆舞会，我们给予你许多服装选择，这些服装试穿起来很方便，能够让你展现自己的个性，这样你就能够遇到他人，玩得很开心。我觉得这是不同于纯粹社交互动和纯粹游戏的心理状态，因为我们以能够将自己融入其中或进行比较的方式融汇二者——但这并非我们追求的文化基因。
你基于不同传统模式的视角看待这一问题。从某种程度上说，你所遇到的问题是其他尝试推广另类内容的人士也会遇到的问题；这很难进行解释，因为你无法说“这就像是X更胜一筹”。
是的，你通过产品经验发现这点。我认为，你的最佳品牌，最佳营销方案和最佳PR活动是你的产品体验。如果你在此把握得当，那么任何接触你产品的人士就能够明白。他们把握体验的本质，你所要表达的内容。我认为这比盒子背面的内容或是你在Unleashed所做的宣传重要。
好友所说的，而非发行商所说的才是关键。
我经常开玩笑说，只有普通女大学生愿意在自己的涂鸦墙上谈论你的产品，或是飞机乘客将注意力转向邻座人员，你才算是成功。只有获得口头传播你才算是表现不俗。这是个很棒的流通方式，因为它不会说谎。要正确把握非常困难，但若做到这点，将非常具有爆发力。我们已亲眼目睹这一情况。但在此文化层面有所突破的游戏作品通常无法轻易重复，但它们是行业的未来。我并不将此看做是脱离常规或是一次性现象。
我将列举另一有助于理解的类推分析。我看着电视，我也是潜在的电视观众。我对电视有潜在瘾性，但这鲜少出现，只有在我着迷于电视的情况下。我着迷于这些场景表演。我着迷于《Lost》，着迷于《Breaking Bad》和《权力的游戏》，我想要寻找新节目，当我看到最后一集内容时，我有些沮丧，就像读完一本优秀的作品一样。事实上，就去年夏天我们给自己安排的《Breaking Bad》内容来看，我只让我的朋友每天观看一集，我每天计算还剩多少天，这着实非常沮丧。现在我非常着迷于《The Newsroom》。所有剧情都有若干能够重复的线索，有特定公式，但并非简单的重复。若这完全公式化，你定不会喜欢其中内容。《Breaking Bad》内容新颖，完全出乎意料，充满惊喜和趣味。若有人制作粗糙的翻版《Breaking Bad》，你定不会喜欢它们。
但我觉得这是可重复内容。由于这些连续剧，我对于电视的未来持乐观态度；若这些剧集没有出现，我则就不这么认为。《Breaking Bad》将我带回电视。同样，我觉得我们刚刚进入社交游戏时代。要有类似的经历——我像着迷于《Breaking Bad》那般着迷于《CityVille》，我记得1年前的圣诞节，我在《CityVille》游戏中度过节日。我和家人呆在科罗拉多，我总是想，我要利用孩子们小睡的时间，我得回家，我得腾出1个小时，因为我想玩《CityVille》。当我完成内容时，我感到有些沮丧。我希望再次进行体验。我认为它将能够再次激起我的兴趣。
你所说的内容让我回想起有些作曲家曾说过的，优秀音乐就是秩序和混乱之间的完美平衡；若你融入过多秩序，内容就会非常枯燥，若你融入过多混乱，内容就会令人厌恶。
是的，所以其中包含熟悉、可预测的元素，同时也有悬念。我觉得自己的内心真正着迷于游戏，我希望自己的决定能够起到关键性作用。我希望做出有意义的决策，我希望自己在做出优秀决策时能够收获即时满足感，它们带来长久的更有利位置。这主要就游戏方面而言；有关社交方面，我希望自己的体验方式，所做的决策能够让我同他人共享情感。通常这就是开怀大笑。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译）
Mark Pincus访谈之社交游戏广告及行业创新编辑本段回目录
Zynga董事长兼首席执行官Mark Pincus探讨社交游戏的性质、广告和下一代重大的产业创新。经过对多位游戏业的CEO的访谈可知，他们当中大多数既是富有商业头脑的管理者，也是热心的游戏玩家。Pincus显然也是一位热心玩家，但他还持有哈佛大学的MBA学位。
你目前玩什么游戏吗？
我现在和Reid Hoffman还有其他朋友一起在《Scramble》中比赛。和Bing（游戏邦注：Bing指Bing Gordon，他是Kleiner Perkins风险投资公司的合伙人及Zynga董事会成员）玩没意思，因为他破了游戏纪录了。在技术导向型游戏中，你必须配合得很好。《FarmVille》和《Settlers of Catan》有点像，《Settlers of Catan》是一款相当好的社交游戏。我们学到的是，这类合作游戏其实隐藏了PvP，在运气和复杂度之间实现了良好的平衡。这类游戏中有复杂的社交动态系统，不仅能留住玩家还可以让玩家带更多人到游戏中来。就比如我，带了一个不想玩的朋友进来游戏。结果是他赢了，这主要是因为所有人都肯和他交易，因为没人相信他有机会赢。这几乎就像这款自我调节的游戏给自己创造了平衡力量，每个人都认为我最强，所以没人愿意和我交易，结果我得了最后一名。
我认为正是这种平衡使游戏有趣。即在技术和PvP上，游戏保持平衡且配合良好。但我们感兴趣的是，怎么才能吸引休闲玩家，这类人对游戏有一点儿兴趣，想感觉到自己的进步又不必打败别人。玩家仍然可以比等级，但他们可以选择在什么时候什么地方进行竞争还是合作。
Zynga Unleashed(from gamesindustry)
不同的人有不同的动机；你我可能更争强好胜，而你妈妈也许只想玩得开心就好。最好的情况是，在游戏中你可以选择自己的胜利条件。
是的！我过去总说，优秀的社交游戏就像一部莎士比亚著作，不同人可以在同一款游戏中一起玩，同时获得完全不同的体验、成长和意义。我的外甥可以把这款游戏当成战斗游戏玩，我妈妈或侄女可以把它当成装扮游戏玩，而我可以当它是策略游戏玩。我认为有这种可能——虽然不总是如此，因为游戏的乐趣会有所减少，但我觉得《CityVille》有点接近这种游戏。
我的外甥们最喜欢比拼超级特权，如果特权系统不够深入，他们就冲我发火，因为他们是真正的玩家。我妈妈只喜欢布置和设计她的城市。我妈妈和外甥可以喜欢和分享同一款游戏。这一点，是人们所忘记的——而我越来越能感觉到，因为我是一个电子游戏玩家。你自己与他人不同的玩法让你觉得有点儿像被误解的少数。别人不理解你，认为你在做的事很愚蠢，而你却说“不，如果你也能这么做，你就会喜欢了，这很棒啊！”
之后你说看吧，这里有个12键的控制器，试一试。
对啊！玩任天堂的Wii时，我第一次看到我的家人挑游戏玩。他们说“哇，这很酷啊，我可以玩保龄球和网球了！”我喜欢在游戏时说“我早就跟你说过了！”甚至是对于资深硬核玩家，我认为当他们看到自己能和朋友、家人一起玩一款游戏时，他们也会感觉到新的乐趣。他们甚至会返回去玩一款自己原来根本不玩的游戏，只是因为你终于让亲朋好友玩游戏了。
你曾提到试图构建一种网络，将其他开发商的游戏带进Zynga.com这个平台。你还谈到要让投资商们充满信心地投资平台，保持透明度非常重要。就像苹果对App Store的管理，你是不是打算对Zynga.com的发展策略彻底公开化，而不是一个一个地跟投资商们洽谈呢？
我觉得为了行业的成长，我们要做的事还有很多。我们需要值信赖而持久的规则，就像我们对手机平台的掌控一样。我们需要有价值的沟通渠道。我们需要对开发商来说透明而稳定的规则，或者即使这个规则改变了，也是因为开发商们都同意并认为这有利于开拓社交游戏的市场。Zynga是这种生态系统中的一个参与者。
我认为，不只是在游戏中，还有在用户网络和用户手机、任何大型用户服务应用中，都可能开启API，并使其他第三方在其受众和基础结构上进行创新。这正是我们努力的方向。为了吸引开发商，为获得好的长期的平台投资，你必须公开透明、持久可信，让他们觉得这个平台就像拨号音：是通用的，不会改变，即使改变也是为了变得更好。这样，你才能挣取并保持他们对你的信任。
就像亚马逊网络服务系统（AWS）。
是的，AWS从开发商的角度出发，做得相当好。他们已经成为互联网技术堆栈的一部分了。他们的服务对成千上万的开发商都有重大影响力，是非常有价值的服务，确实令人不可思议。我们也希望能提供一点儿那样的技术堆栈，而我们的实现办法会让开发商和公司觉得他们可以与我们建立长久的合作关系，他们可以投资，可以看到进展，可以看到我们的共同努力。我们始终是一个倡导合作的公司。作为开发商，我们已经努力成为最好的、最有价值的Facebook、苹果、Google和Android运营商的合作伙伴，如果其他开发商与我们合作发行、使用我们的API服务，我们也希望Zynga能成为对他们来说，最有价值、最值得依赖的合作伙伴。
在我余下的职业生涯里，我将为此而努力。你是这么做的，Bing也是，只是我从事的社交游戏而不是传统的游戏；虽然才过去五年，但我希望有所建树，想与其他玩家、开发商建立这种关系，我想要做点经得起考验、重要而有价值的事。 Jeff Bezos对亚马逊的投资方式就是可信而持久的，我由此受到启发。亚马逊是绝对可靠的，已经成为业界的一道永久的风景线。我敢说它将十年不倒。
当你需要网络服务时，你会想到AWS，这几乎就是自然而然的事了。
无论是AWS还是作为网上书店和商业空间的Amazon.com，人们觉得它就像沃尔玛一样永久，一定程度上可以说是长青树了。那就是我们的目标。那正是我对社交游戏的期待，对Zynga的厚望。如果你看看我们公司演变历程，你会发现它的方向就是持续性和可拓展性。
那对你来说是一个大变化吗？现在，作为一家要向投资者汇报季度绩效的上市公司，你始终专注于长远规划。就你看待事物的方式而言，这是个大变化。如果Zynga是一家非上市公司，你是否会更开心，但不幸的是，之后SEC（美国证券交易委员会）条例迫使你们上市了？
我从来没有质疑我们是否要上市，我认为想把公司做大做强，拥有大量雇员股票持有者和深厚的投资商基础，那么公司就不可避免地要上市。我们竭尽全力朝着北极星的方向——社交游戏前进，我们努力争取大商机。我们告诉投资商，“如果你相信长期的商机，那就决定吧；然后如果你认为我们的决策和执行好或不好，那就决定吧。”我认为那就是我们所希望的。
我认为，新行业里的公司可能被误解了很长时间了。遭到一点儿误解没什么，但不能接受的是，因为担心行业或投资商不相信你的持久，就改变了你的策略或你的执行。投资商的精明总是让我倍受启发。当我跟投资商洽谈时，我听到的问题是我们是否在平台上、手机上、广告上、和其他成长的领域上下足了资本，而不是“我们是否完全掌握了当前的时机。”我相信市场会回报明智的长期投资商，而最佳机遇也是留给明智的投资商的。我们希望能吸引到这种和我们眼界一致的、明智的投资商。
所以，你们试图创造一种适宜的、长期稳定的气候，而不必担心天有不测风云？
是的，当我们开始公开的每日报表制度时，至少是关于我们的日活跃用户的，它还是个新事物。它不仅公开，而且我们在上市以前就一直这么做了。一方面，公开报表有可能导致人心浮动，但另一方面，当开发了一款很棒的新游戏或机制时，看到这些数字迅速增长，那也是相当振奋人心。
就像玩游戏挣积分，看到自己得到很高的积分。看！新纪录！
对啊，就这样，日常工作变成了电子游戏。自己的决策产生即时的——虽然不总是令人满意的结果。那大概就是为什么我那么痴迷于Zynga，因为它达到了我对一款好游戏的所有标准。
确实令人着迷，有策略元素、装扮元素……对了，广告好像是Zynga的一个大发展机遇。你成功吸引到的庞大受众，广告商们应该相当有兴趣，这是一个优势。在State Farm项目上你有过一些成功的经验，就用户沉浸感方面而言，将广告整合进游戏中看似非常成功。你是否认为在搜索引擎广告方面也存在相当的机遇，或者你是否认为广告必须整合进游戏中才能获得真正的成功？
这个问题，我没有统一的答案，答案是多种多样的。我认为在接下来的五年里，社交游戏广告仍然是股趋势。如果说现在还没有，那么以后社交游戏广告将会自立为商业部门。契机有三个：第一个是商业广告业的成长，越来越有价值，显示广告以点击量付费，我认为庞大的总量能保持效益，而游戏开发商将会是这些广告的最大买家之一。
第二个是针对品牌广告商的更高价值的广告，也就是我们所谓的嵌入式广告。我们认为在广告商们尚不能开辟网络渠道以前，它将巨大的价值传递到品牌中，潜力巨大。让品牌如麦当劳、百思买或美国运通进入游戏，以一种可重复的、可拓展的方式将品牌与游戏体验、赞助内容相结合，甚至游戏化品牌，现在就有了某种通货，可以用这些通货玩游戏了。
举个例子，将麦当劳引入你的城市中，它所创造的回报比仅推出一个常规的汉堡嵌入式广告更大。它可以让你同其他在游戏中拥有麦当劳商店的人建立联系。它可以变成一种社交对象。还可以再加入许多东西，可扩展又可重复，但让用户产生强大的沉浸感。用户不只是沉浸于品牌本身，而且能体验到更有意义的东西，不只是点击，不只是为了购买一个搜索词而点击麦当劳图标，这是什么意思？其实就是让用户对品牌作出更有意义的反应。
第三个让我感到兴奋的是，广告本身的游戏化。我认为，特别是在手机上，增加广告的趣味性和互动性，如看广告赢东西，这种想法非常好。从终端用户的角度看，谷歌就是这么让广告变得有趣的，我们也可以通过游戏化广告达到相同的效果。想像一下在整个游戏过程中进行“百事挑战”（游戏邦注：这是由百事可乐公司于1975年开始举行的一个市场促销活动。1981年，该活动奖励集齐带有字母的可乐瓶盖并拼写出“challenge”的消费者。），玩家通过我们的网络抽取一些有挑战的东西，但不只是抽点什么。玩家在屏幕上抽到一些有点像“Take the Pepsi Challenge today”或者抽一个带“刮刮乐”的小瓶，然后立即赢得某种奖品，再进入更大的比赛。或者想像《Scramble》是一个由AmEx赞助的广告，布满了手机屏幕，广告上说“找到这些字母”。我对还没达到但容易实现的目标更感兴趣，而不是已经达到的目标。
这其中确实很有商机。
这种广告粘性好极了！想像一下，这种像游戏一样的广告可以吸引到多少人参与其中，而不只是点击广告进入其他什么地方。
我得承认，当我看到《ChefVille》时，我立即想到的是，如果我可以设计一家自己的连锁餐厅，能过改变布局或菜单吸引顾客，那会怎么样呢？
Mark Pincus：是的，我认为你想到的正是让我感到兴奋的，这种关于超休闲游戏的突发奇想，可能让我妈妈玩上模拟经营游戏，可能让我外甥或我妈妈就运作一种虚拟经营或者真实的经营。我外甥告诉我，如果他们可以靠玩游戏挣到3美元，他们会不停地玩上两周。他们还说，“不要给我发支票，给我一张夹带3美元现金的信封。”他们认为“那是我们能想到的最酷的事了。”
击败修草地了。
对啊！他们原本什么也得不到就已经能够乐在其中，所以真正得到点什么的时候自然就会更投入了……就像我妻子第一次写博客时，她太投入了，每周日晚上都要写，最后我问她，“我很好奇，你在博客上做什么啊？”她回答，“我每个月都能从谷歌得到一张支票，比如3美元。”
但那就是奖励。
它就像是一种虚拟游戏，一款模拟经营游戏。她继续创建“One Kings Lane”网站（游戏邦注：“One Kings Lane”是一家主要经营家具家装类产品和服务的网上商城），因为这能挣的钱可比3美元多多了。
我认为，Zynga的另一个重大机遇是，你们的实际消费玩家比重相当小——这是社交游戏的难题。另一方面，即使你们只是做出小小的改变，也可能对盈利底线产生重大影响。这是不是你认为有可能发生重大改变的东西？
是的，那也正是为什么许多精明的公司都在设法突破，因为这对我们的产业成长至关重要。我确实认为新一代公司会更加明确，因为他们为那4%的玩家创造了在游戏中消费的新动机——有些玩家想消费一百或两百美元，因为他们重复泡沫机制。我们一直在想办法解决这个问题。我觉得我们的研究还太肤浅。
我一直喜欢这种典型受众，我把我自己和其他从来没有玩过游戏的人，也就是非玩家当成典型受众。比如，TechCrunch网站的Michael Arrington，他对我来说就是个典型，因为他一度质疑游戏行业，而 《CityVille》让他动摇了，他玩上那款游戏了。之后他又迷上《帝国与同盟》，他告诉我，他在游戏上花了550美元，他真的很喜欢那款游戏。有些人平时非常质疑游戏，突然有一天，为了游戏，他们不是花了2美元，而是550美元—— 对我来说，这就是游戏的力量。因为存在某些游戏机制，无论是社交还是游戏本身，深深地改变了他。
作为业内人士，我们更清楚是什么使他转变了，我相信还有数百万像他这样的人，很容易就为在《帝国与同盟》中他们看到的有价值的东西花钱，就跟免费找朋友聊聊天似的。那就是为什么即使我知道未来是不确定的并且总是不确定的，我还能这么乐观，因为我们已经抓住要点了。
因为手机和社交游戏的历史还太短，所以你不能预测以后会发生什么。《FarmVille》已经运营3年了，一开始谁能预料到呢？
还有我们的《Poker》游戏，从日活跃用户来看，我们的第一款游戏仍然是Facebook上最大的游戏。我认为这让行业分析家和投资商对市场的不确定性程度感到沮丧，但我喜欢我的工作，尽管总会遇到不确定、正确——更经常的是错误。
这就是机遇；不确定性太多，但你可以发掘利用这种不确定性。
在过去五年的每一个阶段，许多人都曾指出所有的不确定性和所有的不可行的原因。但我总是喜欢激励我的团队，“如果一切正常，那会怎么样？”我们都花了很多时间去思考错误会是怎么样的，但我们从不花相同的时间和精力去思考正确会是怎么样的。
很久以前，当我建立我的发行公司时，我们花了大量时间考虑所有消极情况，我们从不想如何一切顺利会怎么样。于是，当我们的游戏大获成功时，我们竟不知道要做什么。
是啊！我们当中大多数人不太想“如果一切顺利怎么办？”。那是我们所有人都要经历的一场持久的心理战。所有经济上和我们周围的消极信号总是把人引向消极思考，但那正是为什么我总是认为乐观主义者通常是最成功的人，因为他们得拿未来下赌注。
未来总是不确定的，但更重大的事情要发生时，你可以相当清楚地知道。特别是当市场变化时。我认为我们已经证明了人们喜欢游戏。我不认为我们还要质疑是否存在一款适合Michael Arrington或我妈妈的游戏。所以我很乐观，因为我想，好吧，我们确实难以猜到让他着迷的下一款游戏是什么，但一切皆有可能。
既然你知道你可以把普通人变成游戏玩家，那一切都有可能。
是的，那是不是很令人吃惊？作为行业的开拓者，可能总是认为一切皆有可能，但我们现在其实就是以此为生。你和Bing一定感到很惊奇，游戏现在就像电视一样成为主流娱乐形式了。
是的，是大不同了。在EA发展早期，我们很好奇如何让所有人都购买我们的游戏，但现在的情况却是有人惊呼“天呐，现在所有人都来买我们的游戏了！出乎意料啊！”我认为在传统玩家当中，有些人会觉得“这些手机和社交游戏太糟了，真讨厌！”问这些人“为什么你讨厌这类游戏，只是游戏罢了？”他们回答“因为不是我喜欢玩的游戏。”那好吧，还有许多人喜欢玩呢。
我要提醒你的是，人们对糟糕的网页体验感到失望，觉得它不能和AOL和桌面应用体验相比。但它降低了门槛，谁都可以访问其中内容，并且也越来越好了。现在它可能仍然不像桌面应用那么好，但它毕竟是变好了，也能互动了，所以没有人再抱怨了。
没人想回到AOL重重约束的时代了。
没错！（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）
Zynga Interview: Mark Pincus Part 2
By Steve Peterson
Zynga’s CEO talks about game advertising and why managing Zynga is like playing a game
Part two of our interview with the Chairman and CEO of Zynga, Mark Pincus, delved into the nature of social games, advertising, and the next great innovations. After interviewing many CEOs in the game industry, most are either a very business-focused person or a gamer at heart who also manages a business. Pincus is clearly a gamer at heart, even though he has his MBA from Harvard.
Disclosure: Pincus refers to Bing Gordon here, who is a partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins and a Zynga board member. Bing is also the guy I used to work for at Electronic Arts back in the ’80s. I let Mark Pincus know that at the beginning of the interview.
Before proceeding, please first read Part One here.
Q: What games are you playing now?
Mark Pincus: I’m in a competition now with Reid Hoffman in Scramble With Friends. It’s not fun with Bing because he’s off the charts in that game. You have to be well-matched in a skill-based game. What we learned with collaborative games like FarmVille that are a little more like Settlers of Catan, which has been such a great social game, is they really hide the PvP, and they have such a brilliant balance of luck and complexity. There’s a complex social dynamic that keeps everyone in the game and you’re able to bring new people in because – I just brought a friend into the game, and he didn’t want to play, I think he ended up winning. It was basically because everyone would trade with him because nobody believed he had a chance of winning. It’s almost like this self-regulating game that creates its own balance of power, and everyone thought I’d be the best so no one would trade with me, and I came in last.
I think that there’s this balance that keeps the games fun and interesting. In skill and PvP you’ve gotta get the balance and the matching right. But we’re interested in how we’ve been able to turn on games that are hobbies for people, and they’re this escape but also have a little bit of click zen and a feeling of progressions without necessarily having to beat other people. People will still compete on levels, they make up their own ways, but they get to choose where and when they want it to be competitive versus collaborative.
Q: For different people there are different impulses; you or I may be more competitive, but your mom may just want to make something pretty. The best thing is when you have a game where you can choose you own victory conditions.
Mark Pincus: Yes! I’ve always said that a great social game is Shakespearean, because three different people can play and have totally different experiences, different paths, and get different things out of the same game. My nephews can play and it’s just a fighting game, my mom or niece can play and it’s a decorating game, and I can play and it’s a strategy game. I think there’s that potential – not always, because games can get diluted, but I think CityVille was a little bit like that.
My nephews were all about competing to have the most ubered up franchise, and they got mad at me when the franchise system didn’t go deep enough, because they’re real gamers. My mom just loved decorating and designing her city, and my nephews and my mom loved that they could actually share a game. What people forget – and I felt this growing up because I was a video gamer – you feel a little bit like this misunderstood minority. No one gets it and they think what you’re doing is dorky, and you’re like “No, no if you would just do this, it’s so cool, you’d get into this!”
“A great social game is Shakespearean”
Mark Pincus
Q: Then you say see, here’s this controller with 12 buttons, give it a try.
Mark Pincus: Right! With the Nintendo Wii, it was the first time I saw my family pick up video games and start playing; they were like “Wow, this is cool, I can do bowling and tennis!” and I’m like “I’ve been telling you this for years!” Even for someone who’s a fairly core gamer I think that there’s new fun when you can see that your real friends and family will participate in a game, and you’ll even step backwards, maybe, and play a game you wouldn’t have played, just because you finally got them in a game.
Q: You mentioned on stage about trying to build a network and trying to bring in games from other developers, and have Zynga.com as a platform. You also talked about transparency being important for you to confidently invest in a platform. Are you going to get to that point with Zynga.com, where you just lay the terms out there publicly like Apple does with the App Store, rather than negotiate one by one?
Mark Pincus: I think there’s a lot of things we need for this industry to grow. I think we need reliable, persistent navigation that is totally controlled by users, like we have on mobile. I think we need valuable communications channels. I think we need rules for developers that are transparent and don’t ever change, or if they do change it’s for reasons that developers agree with and understand to help grow the market of social gaming. Zynga is a participant in that ecosystem.
I believe that, not just in gaming, but in consumer internet and consumer mobile, any large consumer service application has an opportunity to open up APIs and enable other third-parties to innovate on top of their audience and their infrastructure, and that’s the path we’re moving down. In order to bring those developers, and have the really good ones invest in your platform over time, you need to earn and maintain their trust by being open and transparent and consistent and reliable and they need to feel like it’s a dial tone; it’s something like a utility that won’t ever change, or if it does it’s because you believe you just made it a better dial tone.
Q: Like Amazon Web Services.
Mark Pincus: Yeah, we can see examples like AWS that have just done it beautifully from a developer standpoint. They’ve become part of the tech stack of the Internet. They are providing a really incredible valuable service that’s giving leverage to thousands of developers, and we hope to provide a piece of that tech stack as well, and do it in a way that developers and companies feel like they can form ten-year relationships with us, that they can invest in this, see where it’s going, and see what we’re building together. We’ve always been a company that’s about partnering. As a developer, we’ve tried to be the best, most valuable partner to Facebook, to Apple, to Google, to the Android carriers, and we hope to be the most valuable, reliable partner for any other developers if they publish with us, if they use API’ed services from us.
Look, I’m in this for the rest of my career. The same way you have been, and Bing has been, except I’m in social gaming instead of traditional gaming, and it’s only been five years, but I want to build something, and I want to build these relationships with players, with developers, something that stands the test of time and is really important and valuable. I’m inspired by the way that Jeff Bezos has made that kind of reliable, consistent investment with Amazon, you feel it. There’s just something that’s so rock-solid about Amazon, from 360 degrees it’s rock-solid. It’s become a permanent part of the landscape. I would bet it’s going to be there in ten years.
Q: It’s become someplace people turn to automatically; when you need web service support, you call AWS.
Mark Pincus: Whether it’s AWS, or it’s Amazon.com as our bookstore and our e-commerce place. You feel it’s as permanent as Wal-Mart; in some ways maybe more permanent. That’s what we want to be. That’s what I want for social gaming, and I want for Zynga. If you look at the whole evolution and history of our company it’s been about driving for long-term sustainability and scalability.
Q: Does that represent a big change for you? Now as a public company with investors asking for quarterly results, and you’ve been focused on a long-term vision. That’s a big change in the way you have to look at things. Were you happier being a private company and then, damnit, the SEC rules forced you to become a public company?
“It’s OK to be a little misunderstood; but what’s not OK is to change your strategy or your execution because you’re worried about what your industry or investors are going to think of you in the short term”
Mark Pincus
Mark Pincus: I never really questioned whether we would go public, I just questioned when. I think that if you want to be a large, important company with a lot of employee shareholders and a diverse investor base, it’s just inevitable you’re going to be public. You do all you can to keep pointing toward your North Star – for us it’s social – and you keep trying to point to the macro opportunities. You try to say to investors, “Decide if you believe in that long-term opportunity and then decide if you think that our strategy and our execution against that is good or bad.” I think that’s all we can hope for.
I think companies in new industries can be misunderstood for long periods of time. It’s OK to be a little misunderstood; but what’s not OK is to change your strategy or your execution because you’re worried about what your industry or investors are going to think of you in the short term. I’m always inspired by how smart investors really are. When I talk to investors, the questions I get are whether we’re investing enough in platform, whether we’re investing enough in mobile, in advertising, and in these growth areas, not “are we optimizing the current opportunity fully.” I’m a believer that the market rewards smart long-term investors, and the smart ones find their ways to the best opportunities. We hope that we attract those smart investors that see what we see.
Q: So you’re trying to create a good long-term climate and not worry about the daily weather.
Mark Pincus: Yeah, and when we get a daily report card, at least on our daily active users, and it’s a public report card, it’s a new thing. It’s not just being public; we’ve had this long before we went public. It potentially can be a constant distraction but the flip side of it is when you launch great new games and great new mechanics, and you move those numbers in big step-function ways like we have, that’s also exciting.
Q: It’s keeping score, and you get a high score. Look! New high score!
Mark Pincus: That’s right, it turns your day job into a video game. It has immediate – not always gratification, but immediate results of your decisions, and you’re on a long-term arc. That’s probably why I’m so addicted and obsessed with Zynga, because it meets all my criteria for a great game.
Q: It’s compelling, there are strategy elements, decorative elements… Moving on, advertising seems like a big opportunity for Zynga. The advantage of having a huge audience that you’ve managed to attract is that it should be very compelling for advertisers. You’ve had some successes like with State Farm, integrating advertising into the game seems to have been very successful in terms of user engagement. Do you think there’s a comparable opportunity to search engine advertising, or do you think advertising has to be integrated into the game to be really successful?
Mark Pincus: I don’t have one answer for you; I think there’s multiple answers to this. I think we’ll see a couple of trends continuing to play out in the next five years in social game advertising, which I think will be its own real business segment if it isn’t already. One is the growth of the commodity ad business, getting more and more valuable, the display ads that are pay-per-click, I think just the sheer volume will continue to make that interesting, and I think game developers will always be some of the biggest buyers of those ads.
The second is higher value ads for brand advertisers, what we think of as engagement advertising. We think that has enormous potential to deliver great value to brands in ways that they haven’t been able to unlock online before. The opportunity to let a brand like McDonald’s or Best Buy or American Express start to integrate with your games and integrate with the game experience and sponsor part of the game experience, and even gamify parts of that experience, in ways that are repeatable and scalable, where you now have currencies and you can play with those currencies.
An example is putting a McDonald’s in your city; it has greater payout than a regular burger joint, it has cooler looking art, and we can even give it more dimensions than that. It could connect you to everyone else who has a McDonald’s in the game. It could become a social object. There are so many things that you could put in there that are scalable and repeatable but give the brand advertiser a way to drive measurable engagement. Not just engagement with their brand, but something that’s actually measurable in a more meaningful way than just clicks, than just did I buy a search word and people clicked on ‘burger joint’ and McDonald’s, what does it mean? They could actually get you to respond in more meaningful ways to their brand.
The third way that I’m really excited about is actually gamification of the ads themselves. I think, especially on mobile, the opportunity to make the ads fun and interactive and the chance to win things – it’s just cool. From an end-user’s standpoint, the same way that Google made ads interesting, I think we can do that by gamifying ads. Think about what you could do in Draw Something; imagine a Pepsi Challenge in the entire game today where everyone is drawing some Pepsi bottle, and they’re going to announce winners, and we can take that Pepsi Draw Something Challenge across our whole network, not just Draw Something. So you could see a little Draw Something screen, and ‘Take the Pepsi Challenge today’ and draw a little bottle and it’s like a scratch-off, you can immediately win something and enter this bigger contest. Or imagine Scramble as an ad; a Scramble ad interstitial anywhere on mobile, sponsored by AmEx or somebody, and they say ‘Find these words.’ I’m more intrigued by all of the low-hanging fruit that hasn’t happened yet than what has happened.
“I’m really excited about gamification of the ads themselves”
Mark Pincus
Q: There’s a lot of opportunity there.
Mark Pincus: The level of engagement is off the charts! Imagine the percent of people that will participate in an ad that’s a game, when they’re there to play games, versus an ad that is a click-through to whatever.
Q: I have to admit when I saw ChefVille I immediately thought, what if I could design my own restaurant as part of a chain, and see what kind of traffic I could get by changing the layout or the menu.
Mark Pincus: Yeah, I think what you’re hitting on is what I’m excited about, these emergent ideas in uber-casual gaming, and the opportunity to let my mom play in a biz sim. The opportunity for my nephews or my mom to literally be running a virtual business – or a real business. My nephews told me if they could earn three dollars by playing a game, they would play it non-stop for two weeks. And they said, “Don’t send me a check, send me an envelope with three cash dollars in the envelope.” They were like, “That’s the coolest thing we can imagine.”
Q: Beats mowing lawns.
Mark Pincus: Right! They’re already grinding away for nothing, so to actually get something out of it… It’s like when my wife had her first blog, and she was so focused on having to publish every Sunday night, and finally I said “I’m just curious, what do you make on your blog?” and she said, “I get a check every month from Google for like three dollars.”
Q: But it’s a reward.
Mark Pincus: It was like a virtual game, it was like a biz sim. She went on to build One Kings Lane, which is making a lot more than three dollars, I should say.
Q: To me, the other big opportunity for Zynga is the percentage of your players who actually give you money is a very small percentage – that’s the social game conundrum. The flip side of that is the opportunity that, even if you could make real small changes it could have a big impact on the bottom line. Is that something you see has good potential to change significantly?
“The next great startup is going to be because they invented a new reason for 4 percent of players to want to spend money”
Mark Pincus
Mark Pincus: Yes, and that’s also why competition, and many more smart companies innovating against this is just so crucial to the growth of our industry. I really believe that the next great startup is going to be defined more because they invented a new reason for 4 percent of players to want to spend money in your game – and some of them to want to spend a hundred or two hundred dollars – than because they iterated on the bubble mechanic. We’re working at that all the time. I feel like we’ve just scratched the surface.
I always like this focus group of one, and I use myself and I use other people who are life-long never-play gamers, non-gamers, and Michael Arrington from TechCrunch was a great one for me, because he was kind of skeptical of the industry for a while. Then CityVille brought him in, and he got it. Then in Empires & Allies he was really into it, and he told me he spent $550 on the game and he really got it. When you think about that – taking somebody who was skeptical about games in their life and all of a sudden they’re in this place where they’re spending not $2, but $550 dollars – that, to me, shows the power. Because there were some game mechanics, both social and game, that converted him, that hit a vein.
As an industry, as we get better at honing in on what those veins are that scratches his itch, I believe that behind him there’s just millions of other people who could just as easily be playing Words With Friends for free as spending real money on things that they see value in an Empires & Allies game. That’s why even though I know the future’s uncertain – it always is – I’m optimistic about it, because we’ve connected the dots before.
Q: Because mobile and social games have such a short history, you can’t predict what will happen. FarmVille’s been going for three years now; who would have predicted that at the start?
Mark Pincus: Or our Poker game; our very first game is still the largest game on Facebook by DAUs. I think it’s been frustrating for industry analysts and investors all along that there’s levels of uncertainty in the market, but I feel like my job has been to continue to go after it in a big way despite the uncertainty and to be right – more often than I’m wrong!
Q: That’s the opportunity; there’s so much uncertainty, you can exploit it.
Mark Pincus: Every chapter in the last five years, lots of people have pointed out all of the uncertainty and all the reasons why it might not work. But I always like to challenge my teams to say, “What would it look like if everything went right?” Because we all spend so much time thinking about what wrong might look like, and we don’t spend an equal amount of time or greater thinking about what right looks like.
Q: When I launched my publishing company long ago we spent lots of time thinking about all the negative scenarios, and we didn’t think at all about what would happen if things went well. Then when we introduced our game and it was a hit, we had no idea of what to do.
Mark Pincus: Right! It really is true that most of us under-invest in the strategy around “what if everything goes right?” It’s a constant mental battle to do it for all of us. You see all kinds of negative signals in the economy and everywhere around us that could lead you always to that place, but that’s why I’ve always thought that the optimists are usually the most successful people, because someone’s got to bet on the future.
The future’s always uncertain, but you can pretty much know that something bigger is going to happen. Especially when these markets develop. I think we’ve proven that people want to play. I don’t think we have to question anymore whether or not Michael Arrington, if there’s a game for him, or my mom. That’s why I’m optimistic, because I just think, OK, it’s not easy to figure what the next game is that brings him in, but I know it’s possible.
“I always like to challenge my teams to say, ‘What would it look like if everything went right?’”
Mark Pincus
Q: Now you know you can scratch an ordinary person and find a gamer.
Mark Pincus: Yeah, and isn’t that amazing? You guys, as the pioneers of this, might have always thought that was possible, but we’re actually living that today. It must be amazing for you and Bing to see this as mainstream as TV now.
Q: It is; it’s very different. At EA in the early days we wondered how we could get everybody buying our games, and now to some people it’s “Oh my god, now everybody’s buying our games! We didn’t think about the consequences!” I think there is, among traditional gamers, some level of “These mobile and social games, they’re terrible, I hate them!” “Why do you hate them, they’re games?” “They’re not the kind of games I like to play.” Well, lots of other people are enjoying them.
Mark Pincus: I’ll remind you, my last parting comment, that people were frustrated about the web too. They were frustrated at how bad the experience was compared to AOL and the desktop. But it lowered the barriers so everybody could do it, and it got better. It kept getting better. Today it’s maybe still not quite as good as a desktop but it’s so good and interactive that no one complains anymore.
Q: Nobody wants to go back to AOL’s walled garden.
Mark Pincus: Right!(source:gamesindustry)
Zynga Interview: Mark Pincus In Depth
By Steve Peterson
Part one of a rare conversation with the man behind the #1 social gaming company
The Chairman and CEO of Zynga, Mark Pincus, rarely grants interviews. After months of trying, GamesIndustry International was finally able to sit down with Pincus for an extended interview; one of the longest he’s ever given in fact. What followed is a wide-ranging discussion about Zynga and games, and where Pincus sees the opportunities for Zynga.
Mark Pincus is, according to Forbes, the 256th wealthiest individual in the United States, with a net worth in the neighborhood of $1.8 billion. He’s a serial entrepreneur, having founded several other technology companies before Zynga. He has a B.S. in Economics from Wharton, and his MBA from Harvard Business School.
Zynga, the company he co-founded five years ago in 2007, has grown rapidly along with the tremendous growth of Facebook over that time period. Zynga’s market capitalization right now is about $3.6 billion; by comparison, Electronic Arts’ market cap is at $3.7 billion after nearly 30 years in business. Zynga currently has nearly 250 million monthly active users of its games, which appear on Facebook, mobile devices and their Zynga.com website. Zynga went public on December 16, 2011; its stock price climbed over $14 per share by March, only to drop down to less than $5 per share today.
Zynga’s explosive growth has left it with plenty of critics as well as millions of players. The company has been criticized for copying games, not keeping its stock price up, and being in a declining market. Zynga continues to introduce new games and expand its reach on mobile devices, and just how well this has been succeeding we will find out when their latest earnings report is released next week.
GamesIndustry International sat down with Mark Pincus at the GamesBeat conference in San Francisco last week, right after his appearance on stage to launch the conference.
Q: I was at Zynga Unleashed, and while I realize that presentation wasn’t aimed at investors Zynga’s stock took a dip afterwards…
Mark Pincus: I just ran into two analysts from Lazard and Baird in the hall and they said that what they thought was funny was that the analysts who were there were really positive, and they said the analysts who weren’t there were really negative.
Q: Some analysts have been saying that Zynga’s stock decline has been due to Facebook’s poor performance. Do you think that’s part of what’s going on?
Mark Pincus: It’s not in my main frame of reference. What I spend my time on is what I talked about on stage. I’m thinking about how do we build a large, scalable, repeatable market, and how do we bring hundreds of millions of people into gaming, make it really social, keep them there, move buyer conversion, move across platforms, new categories. That’s my frame of reference and what I think is interesting, and what I think will serve investors in one year or two years or three years. I don’t think that spending my time reading analyst reports and trying to figure out why somebody didn’t like our stock is the best use of my time.
I’m trying to serve current shareholders and future shareholders. I’ve always wanted investors to feel like Zynga was a good deal and the best way for them to invest in these growth categories, in free-to-play gaming and social gaming in the West. I’m a bigger optimist about this future, and I think investors have to decide whether they agree with my optimistic outlook on the future for all of this or not. Then if they do, they need to decide whether or not we represent the best company for them to pursue that with.
Q: Social gaming may be plateauing; Facebook’s visits in the US have leveled off in the last few months according to comScore. Have we reached “peak Facebook,” and if so what does that mean for Zynga?
Mark Pincus: I think you’ve heard Facebook talk about this as well. There is a law of large numbers, as in: There’s only so many people on the planet, there’s only so many people in America, and so when they’re all on Facebook it’s hard to be showing big exciting new user growth numbers. I think that the market opportunity going forward is more about driving new play opportunities, new game mechanics that make games either more social, which we think is the best growth driver, but also have more game mechanics that…have been proven out in core gaming and MMOs for so many years.
Part of the opportunity for all of us over the next five years is how do we package those up in a way that can fit in this form factor [Pincus points to smartphone] of a very small screen, small attention span, and someone who’s not going to read instructions, not going to do tutorials, and it’s got to have a very, very light, soft on-ramp but have a lot of depth of where that experience can go. I think the opportunity is to continue to innovate – it’s a new kind of innovation.
I don’t think it’s as much that you invent the next ‘what’s after guilds?’, but I think it’s more how do you take something like guilds and make that something that isn’t called guilds, that’s more like a tea party that your mom can get into. There are so many different ways for companies to go after delivering on the game opportunity; we want to be consumer and mass-market. So we’re fundamentally interested in games that bring people together, not games that are narrow and divide each other.
Q: In general your games seem to reach a pretty wide demographic, and you’ve looked for games and even for genres and execute them in ways to bring in the biggest possible audience. Is that still your goal, or do you think there may be opportunities in games that are more narrowly focused?
Mark Pincus: There’s opportunity in both. I think there’s just great opportunities opening up in free-to-play in general. I think all free-to-play… as we lower the barriers, and the number one barrier is spending money, and the number 2 is the physical, whether it’s a download or a package, but beyond that I’m coming at this from this personal bent. I fundamentally believe that the biggest opportunity is to get people like me to play. I’m a latent gamer; it’s there, it’s just in the background because I’m too busy, and I can’t find the time, I can’t justify the time. But if you could get it in front of me and you could distill it down to something that I could get into in five minutes, and I could play it with friends and other people, you would have me. It’s gotta be short-form, short session, long arc.
I think that there’s a mentality around me that I fundamentally believe represents a really interesting new mass-market opportunity – in that net you could capture gamers like my nephews, they’re gamers, from Halo 3 to World of Warcraft, but they played CityVille. Also in that net you can capture my mother, you can capture Michael Arrington [former editor of TechCrunch], and I’m turned on by all the people who are too grown up to play, who are too busy to play. They saw games as nerdy and dorky, and now they’re playing. And you know what? They have a lot of money they could spend if they wanted to. It’s nothing for them. It’s not a lot for Alec Baldwin to spend money in a game, I would guess. I don’t think I’ve communicated this right, and it gets distilled within existing paradigms of how people look at the game industry, but I look at this the way someone might have looked at e-commerce on the web. I look at this as a web or a mobile opportunity.
To me it’s lowering the barriers to play, opening this so wide that it’s an everyone experience, and I think that that, in addition to bringing in a new market, I think it has all kinds of network effects that make the game fundamentally more interesting. It’s cool when everyone’s playing a game. It becomes a cultural topic, like when everybody is watching Game of Thrones and talking about it, it makes Game of Thrones cultural content, not just TV content. That’s this kind of cultural meme that I’m excited about, and that’s what we’re pursuing as a company.
Q: Zynga.com does that more because it can hold persistent threaded conversations around games. The idea of taking your social network and building games around it could build a larger audience.
Mark Pincus: It’s a sandbox. We look at Zynga.com as this holistic front-end to our network, where we can try everything at once, and move really quickly, innovate faster. So the team is really inspired by being able to, for the first time, turn on some of these network-level mechanics. At Unleashed the team showed off head-to-head play, the multiplayer, live synchronous play that we built as a widget that we can plug into an arcade game, not just Bubble Safari. That is a couple lines of code that could let anybody turn on head-to-head play.
We’re really into how deep you can go with the social gaming experience. It’s not part of a lot of experiences; that’s all we ever want to be. We think we’ve just scratched the surface with zFriends and all the different ways that we can start to let you accumulate an interesting profile over time. That could be icebreakers, ways for other people to get to know you – they might be your friends who didn’t know your gamer persona. There’s so many ways, like in Settlers of Catan, in these games that we actually get to know each other better. They give us another form of expression.
Part of our job as game designers and social game designers, it’s kind of like a Halloween party or a masquerade party, and we’ve got to give you lots of costume options that are easy for you to try on and let you express your personality, so that you can meet other people and have fun. I think it’s just a different mentality than either someone who’s just about social networking or just about gaming, because – and I know we cross over both in ways that could pull us into those camps or get compared to those – but that’s not this meme that we’re passionately pursuing.
Q: You’re approaching it from a different direction than those traditional modes. In a way you have the problem that anyone faces when you’re trying to market a product that’s not like other things; it’s difficult to explain because you can’t say “it’s just like X only better.”
Mark Pincus: Right, you kind of discover it through the product experience. I’ve always believed that your best branding, your best marketing, your best PR is your product experience. If you do that right, anyone who touches your product gets it. They get the essence of the experience, what you’re about. I think that matters more than what’s on the back of the box or what you promoted at your Unleashed event or whatever.
Q: It’s what your friend says about it that matters, not what the publisher says.
Mark Pincus: I’ve always joked that you’re only as good as what some user fill-in-the-blank college girl who wants to say about your product on her wall post, or someone on the plane turning to the next person. We’re only as good as our word-of-mouth. It’s a great currency, because it doesn’t lie. It’s very hard to get it right, but when you do, it can be really explosive. We’ve seen it. When I look at the games that have broken through on that cultural level, they’ve become word-of-mouth phenomena, they’re not easily repeatable, but I do think they’re shots across the bow that point to the future. I don’t see them as aberrations or one-offs.
I’ll give you one other analogy that’s useful. I look at TV and I am a latent TV watcher too. I have a latent addiction to TV, and it’s seldom filled, but when it is I get obsessed with it. I get obsessed with these episodic shows. I was obsessed with Lost, I was obsessed with Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, and I want to find that new show and I’m really kind of sad, like finishing a great book, when I get to the last episode. In fact, with Breaking Bad we rationed ourselves last summer, and I would only let my friends watch one episode a day, and I was counting how many days we had left, and it was really sad. Now I’m really into The Newsroom. There is some repeatable, but not easy, thread to all those shows, a certain formula to all those shows. If it’s formulaic you won’t like it. Breaking Bad was fresh, it was unexpected, it was surprise and delight. If somebody made a bad copy of Breaking Bad you wouldn’t be excited. It’s hard.
But I think that is a repeatable thing. I’m optimistic about TV’s future because of those shows; before those shows I wasn’t. Breaking Bad brought me back to TV. Similarly, I think we’re just entering that kind of era with social gaming. I think once somebody has that experience – I was addicted to CityVille the way I was addicted to Breaking Bad, to the point that, I remember a year ago Christmas, planning my day around my CityVille play experience. I was in Colorado with my family, and I was thinking, OK, I need time between the kid’s nap at this time, I get home this time, I gotta break out an hour, probably an hour, because I gotta go and play CityVille. When I reached the point I was done with it, I was kind of sad to move on. I want that again. I believe it’s possible to scratch that itch for me again.
Q: You can’t exactly figure out how to bottle the lightning, but you can look to generate it more often. Is that what you’re looking for?
Mark Pincus: Yeah.
Q: What you said reminded me of what some composer once said, that good music is a balance between order and chaos; if you have too much order it’s boring, if you have too much chaos it’s ugly.
Mark Pincus: Yes. So there’s familiar, predictable, but there’s also the twist. I think fundamentally that what’s inside me really getting into a game, I want to feel like my decisions matter. I want to feel like I’m making meaningful decisions, and I want to get immediate gratification if I’m making good decisions, and they lead to some long-term better place. That’s kind of on the game side; on the social side, I want to feel like the way I’m playing, the decisions I’m making, give me the chance to share some emotion with somebody. Usually it’s a laugh.（Source：gamesindustry）
