14 DAY TRIAL // Dave Roberts, who is the Chief Executive Officer of PopCap, has launched a verbal jab Zynga, developer of popular social powered titles for Facebook, saying that it time great content and gameplay mechanics will prove more attractive to players than the marketing tactics of the rival company.
Roberts said at the WTIA TechNW Forum in Seattle that, “Zynga is really good at sort of using money to buy their customers every day. That's an interesting business model, but becomes complicated.”
He added, “I think a lot of the easy money that catapulted companies like Zynga into this crazy stratosphere - the easy money days are gone. That doesn't mean the platform is dead, it just means that you actually now have to work at it. Now, it is not about luck, it is about good, old-fashioned hard work.”
The CEO of PopCap has also noted that the people at Zynga do not have gaming in their company heritage and that his company's Bejeweled Blitz managed to get more daily visitors on Facebook than Mafia Wars even if PopCap does not spend money on marketing.
PopCap has plans to bring Zuma Blitz to Facebook and to then work on more original developments for the platform, although no game names have been announced.
Facebook is seen as an important future platform for gaming because of the huge potential audience and because titles can quickly gain a lot of players as news of a new exciting game spreads through word of mouth via social groups.
At the moment Zynga is estimated to employ about 1,200 people and the company says that it needs to add as many as 1,000 new servers during each day to support the 215 million players who have tried out one of its titles.
One of the most interesting Facebook initiatives is a Civilization based title from Sid Meier and Firaxis.