14 DAY TRIAL // Zynga has been one of the most successful companies when it comes to social based gaming in the last years, with some people putting the value of the company well above 10 billion dollars, and much of the success, representatives are saying, is because of how quickly the company can move.
Speaking at the Game Developers Conference Mark Skaggs, who is the vice president of product development at Zynga, has stated, “Speed wins. Get to the market fast.”
He added, “We only did the minimum amount of art that was needed to ship. At the time discussions were like, ‘can we get away with only twelve types of crops for launch? Well, we only have time for nine’. It was about doing the minimum to get the game out the door.”
He also admitted that when the team has problems deciding which mechanics was the most fun for players in order to implement it in a game, they just chose the simpler one, figuring that ease of use and understanding was as important as the elusive fun for those who formed the Zynga target audience.
The developers at Zynga also admitted that, in the rush to launch their first titles, they have picked up code from another title that was similar to FarmVille.
Skaggs is a veteran of video-game development and has worked on the Command & Conquer franchise before moving to Zynga, and he says that often teams that have less time manage to come up with concepts and game mechanics that are more interesting to the player.
FarmVille and other video games from the same genre rely on getting a lot of players as quickly as possible and then persuading a small segment of them to pay money, through micro-transactions, to get extra items and competitive advantages.
Well-known Civilization developer Brian Reynolds is also working with Zynga on social games.