That ship is sinking fast. Heart goes out to those who are now out of work, but a part of me can't help but be glad that the "exploitative spamming social games" market might be dealt a mortal wound.
Exactly. Zynga laid off employees from a failing division? What's the problem? Who cares when it happened. Those employees should have seen the writing on the wall.
The Boston office did the Adventure World game. I tried it out and found it pretty frustrating - you can only do a few things before you run out of energy and need to harrass your friends or wait 24 hours. It's not a mechanic that works well with an adventure - nobody wants to chop through a few bushes and then wait to enter the temple. Plus there's this gratuitous Indiana Jones thing which is just glommed on.
The difference I think is that in a sandbox game doing a handful of things every eight hours or so can feel fairly satisfying but in an adventure game there's a sort of story and you're interrupting it after you're just getting started.
The general consensus is that they timed it to coincide with Apple's announcement, so that the news of them laying off employees would be buried by all the Apple press.
I think it has more to do with getting the cuts out of the way before their Q3 earnings report comes out tomorrow. Facebook just mentioned in their earnings call this afternoon that they've been hit by a 20% YoY drop in revenue from Zynga, so you know Zynga's results are going to be bad.
Farmville was a great social game and their Words with Friends acquisition was very good... then they started making Farmville clones, blatantly ripping off competitor's games, and paid $200 million for Draw Something.
SimFarm was a classic but rather I'd hesitate to call FarmHappy a SimFarm clone. SimFarm is perhaps the most complex Sim game, I had an easier time with even SimIsle. Gameplay wise there is almost no intersection.
What disappoints me about the current social gaming genre is how many games what would have otherwise been decent tycoons are ruined with slot machine mechanics.
I've been wondering what the big deal is since these games just reminded me of Tycoons anyways, but you have a point with the "slot machine mechanics" bit...though the Tycoons could get pretty slot machiney. I think a lot of the backlash is the fact that these are popular with casual or non-gamers, so they have an image problem with "real" gamers.
You're the first person I've "met" who got SimIsle. Maybe I need to give it another try...
Not quite - they both just happen to be farm themed.
Happy Farm was legitimately a social game - even further than Farmville ended up being. In fact, almost two thirds of the Chinese population that played admitted they did so only so they could steal crops from their friends.
It's almost a case study into the Chinese culture unto itself.
Is it a 'dick move' that Apple releases their products at a time calculated to get maximum media exposure? Or that every other smart company in the World also times bad news?
There are many things one might accurately criticize Zynga for, but this is not one of them. If they hadn't done it this way investors would have yet another reason to sell the stock, it would be evidence the company is run by idiots.
Not a big surprise, especially after having spoken to a few people that have worked at Zynga before. High turnover of employees, quality over quantity, etc. Can't say I'll miss their products or their techniques.
I don't know why everyone is so critical of Zynga trying to hide this news among the Apple stories -- what is the argument for not doing so? "Hey guys, lets make sure EVERYONE hears that we're closing down offices and laying off employees, this is going to be important"
Conceptually, I love every bit of bad Zynga news. I like to be reassured that a company will, in the long term, fail when its products are cynically designed to manipulate. That a company will fail when their strategy assumes it's okay to blatantly, consistently, continuously lift design from other firms and products.
Practically, though, bad Zynga news feels terrible. Because the guys who architected this repugnant exploitation machine already got paid. They made millions selling their stock before the market truly understood what a shit business they were running. Meanwhile, front-line employees sat with their plummeting stock locked up.
So any bad Zynga news is nothing more than notice that yet another group of hardworking folks is, somehow, getting fucked over, despite their leadership enjoying tremendous rewards.
I guess you could argue that Zynga employees have been dancing with the devil for the past couple of years. Any Zynga employee I ever talked to was very open about how they aren't really making games. They are just cynically generating revenue over flaws in the human condition.
I think if you work for a screwy company like Zynga you should be very paranoid about cashing out of the company. If they have such a low opinion of their customers, who is to say they won't have the same sentiment towards their employees.
I find it very hard to feel any pity for the employees that knowingly got involved with such a company, and I would be surprised if many of Zynga's best and most hardworking employees didn't jump ship long ago.
I am more concerned about all the non-technical employees they have, who may have not been as well equipped to recognize Zynga for what it is. Most of the artists probably should have been able to recognize it (with all that tracing going on...), but employees more removed than that could have been relatively blindsided.
If they have access to the internet, they have had plenty of opportunities to read about it. The shameful behavior of Zynga is public knowledge and has been for years.
Any developer with half a brain should know that the game industry should be avoided like the plague. Long working hours, abusive management, racism (the Kixeye debacle), the issues just go on and on.
Take patio11's advice and go into B2B, you'll make money hand over fist with much more manageable working hours.
I work at a mobile game development company in Vancouver, and it's great here. Best environment I've ever worked in. Good people, good management, get in at 8:30 and leave at 5, etc.
Not everyone in the industry is scum, though it's certainly not uncommon.
There are always exceptions, but there sure is a large amount of anecdotal evidence for not-so-great working conditions in general across the gaming industry. If you follow gaming news you'll also hear over and over about lots of "crunch" time, etc.
I've only heard about that at a few big name companies (i.e. EA, Zynga) who's working conditions are legendarily bad. What about some of the other big players? Nintendo? Microsoft? Rare? Square Enix? Valve?
Holy cow, how did I miss that Kixeye story? It read like a horror story. I guess they weren't exaggerating when they used insanity wolf to advertise for jobs, talk about a toxic environment.
It means that their mentality is significantly different from other game companies, which means that generalizations of gaming companies drawn from their work culture are much more tenuous.
I wonder. They don't release a lot of titles. But Steam is a gold mine. I wouldn't be surprised if that's where most of the money comes from these days. If true they're really not a game company but rather a distribution company.
But not likely due to company policy or pressure. By all accounts, Valve employees work on things they enjoy doing and end up spending more time if only to pursue things they find interesting.
My brother works there as a QA, and he's enjoyed every minute of it. There is a reverence and appreciation for their users that trickles down from the CEO into the rest of the company that seems to be the exact opposite of the situation at Zynga.
I know several people working quite happily at gaming companies (doing, from what I can see, some pretty cool stuff), and those game companies who are the most abusive generally have well-known reputations as such.
I suppose it might not be the best industry to go into straight out of college, when you have little leverage and lack industry smarts...
Or you would identify the most likely underlying cause of the stereotype: that the games industry is an industry of love, just like fashion, music, theater or art.
That means that there is a much more abundant supply of labour and that the demand side is exploiting this by offering lower wages, worse working environment, crazier hours etc.
The main difference between fashion, music and art is that the discrepancy is much more poignant in the games industry because there's an abundant supply of well-paying cushy jobs just around the corner which involve almost the exact same skill-set to compare against.
Or you would identify the most likely underlying cause of the stereotype.
The games industry is an industry of love; just like fashion, music and theater are for example.
That means that there is a much more abundant supply of labour and that the demand side is exploiting this by offering lower wages, worse working environment, crazier hours etc.
The main difference between market industries like fashion, music and art is that the discrepancy is much more poignant in games because there's an abundant supply of well-paying cushy jobs which involve almost the exact same skill-set to compare against.
I feel the same way whenever I see large developer layoffs in my city.
I also feel unnerved when I see unsustainable companies go on unsustainable hiring binges. It's like the first scene in a horror movie. Are you crazy? Don't go in there! He'll kill you!
Layoffs are horrible when they happen, but 6 months later after the dust has settled and smoke blown over, everyone who was talented and laid off is now better off because the number of weak ties they now have to people in other companies has multiplied dramatically in a short time.
As someone who was a developer in Austin as of a few months ago, I can imagine other Austin area companies salivating at the fresh infusion of developers into the market. They should be okay (or at least I hope so!).
My startup is based out of Capital Factory, and if you even just walked in the door during Friday happy hour and announced that you were a developer here in Austin looking for a job, hungry funded startup owners would descend on you like wolves.
All that to say: You have nothing to be worried about. And also, come to more events...especially ones held at Capital Factory. :)
There's some serious the-future-isn't-evenly-distributed stuff going on with programming languages and cities. I have a friend in Memphis who tells me that Rails is just starting to get noticed there (!)
From what we've seen on HN it didn't sound like Zynga was a place with great work conditions or interesting work. To the extent people went to work there hoping to get rich one day by dumping their shares on a greater sucker, it's hard to really feel bad for them.
I hate to admit it, but the fact that casinos continue to exist goes to show that the Zynga model will probably hold true.
Both employ game dynamics to get participants to part with their money - the only difference being that casinos require you to pay up front, and Zynga doesn't have the same level of overhead.
The company will only face a race to the bottom, though, as others enter this space and competition for user time ramps up.
Important distinction is that in casinos players can make money. Well, as we know, only a small percentage does and overall it is the house that always wins, but humans are very bad at judging laws of probability. This "flaw" is still not in Zynga's games, and since FB prevents gambling with real rewards it will continue to be so.
Your last sentence will probably hold true, unless they start producing something innovative and useful for a change..
I would argue that money rewards can be equal to in-game rewards, since Zynga players are obviously willing to part money for the latter, but that boils down to a matter of opinion.
It will be interesting to see if management bails from Zynga over the coming quarters. Personally, I would watch and see if management unloads on any stock or options.
Without money awards I suspect you will see far fewer instances of Gambler's Ruin, or other more subtle profit-generating phenomenon. As far as I can tell, there can be no sense of "recouping losses".
But you do get the benefit of using arbitrary "point" conversions, i.e. $10 buys 8 coins, $20 buys 18 coins, etc. It makes it harder for the user to estimate the real value when purchasing, and thus easier to overspend.
Well, if it makes you feel better, I had a conversation with a Zynga employee last night, who is pretty happy about leaving the company. In particular, he wants to go do something he believes in, and to quote him, "and i don't hugely believe in selling virtual cows"
So - to some degree, the crash and possible termination of Zynga's business model, enables these people to escape the company. If the stock had value, then they would be trapped in that really horrible (for some of them) career. When the stock has no value - they are all now free(er) to go - no handcuffs.
This is a really important perspective I hadn't considered. Money can be a very corrosive incentive. If, say, you have student loans or a family to support, you might decide to trade your personal sanity for a payoff.
When i worked for a company that was acquired by Lockheed Martin, immediately upon the announcement of acquisition, several employees resigned saying they could not knowing work for a war monger.
Their conviction was greater than the potential wealth and very commendable.
Your comment insinuates that these employees had no morals and were freed by the failure.
This is actually a fucked up position.
There are many factors that play into this, the most significant of which is the employees living paycheck to paycheck where they cannot actually leave on a high ground position due to their needing the money... and your point is that "well, at least the company failed freeing them of any moral risk of staying with the company should it have succeeded and trapped them with lucrative options!"
To this I say, fully and openly:
Fuck every single thing about Zynga and the attitudes and policies it may beget.
FUCK ZYNGA
and I have zero sympathy for any of its employees in any regard.
I have been openly decrying this company for years - and I still will - I can't stand such bullshit in any industry and Silicon Valley should SHUN them and be ashamed of every relation to this company.
We are trying to make a better world here, aren't we folks?
If not, then fuck you - because if your goal is only self-enrichment then I despise you.
If he didn't have an ethical problem working for Lockheed Martin why would he? His point is that IF you have an ethical problem with the work you are doing, it shouldn't be the devaluation of stock options that gets you to stop.
Hi Sam - I sense you have a lot of anger here, and most of it is probably pretty valid. Money is a funny thing - when you've got a $600K mortgage, and a couple kids heading off to college with $45K/year tuition, and your company gets acquired by Zynga, and you discover you have $500K worth of options that will mature if you stick around for a couple years, or you can walk away from all that, and go get a job as a $120K developer somewhere - well, let's just say it's very tempting to justify selling virtual cows for a couple years.
Understand there is a difference between working for a lame company, and a morally objectionable company.
I could make an argument that what Zynga did with Tiny Towers/Dream Heights wasn't that much different than what Samsung did with it's Galaxy Tab/iPad. In both cases, these companies took another product as an example, and put their own spin on it.
Neither of them is really "morally reprehensible" - but, if you want to do original work, or make the world a better place, there are probably other places you can work - and taking money out of the equations makes it that much easier.
I get mixed emotions. Yes, companies that do 'bad things' ideally are corrected out of existence by the market. I never like to see anyone lose their jobs, because at some level the rank and file of the company is the blood coursing through its veins. And as Marissa Meyer and others have re-iterated over the last few months, companies don't do thing people do things. So people who are getting things done and fighting the good fight, its always painful to see them go.
On the money thing though you really need to come to terms with the fact that there is way more random chance than there is earned riches in the tech business. For every person who got rich being the most brilliant mind on the problem at the right time, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of people who got rich just because who ever was sitting in the seat they happened to be sitting in also got rich. The folks who just happened to be at Sun when it founded, or HP, or Google, or FaceBook. Randomness, not skill, plays a huge role there. There was a guy at Sun whom I helped manage out of the organization, he landed a job at a start up that two months later got bought with a full vesting of everyone. He walked away with several million dollars. It took a lot of thinking about that series of events to let it sit in my head without pissing me off.
Different people exploit their opportunities differently. I know that if I both knew how, and could have, shorted stock I held but was locked up but worth 'millions' I would have. I would have said "That's enough for me, sell it all, and when it dribbles out via my acquisition contract timed unlock I'll hand over the shares." That would have made me 'evil' in the eyes of the shareholders who bought stock during that time (and later sued the company) but my motivation would have been quite pure (FU money is a good thing). But I don't think of myself as an evil guy, and generally am pretty nice.
Bottom line is people with large holdings in a startup will look to 'liquify' a chunk of that to diversify and allow them to activate the wealth 'ratchet' (that is where you solidify your position by converting equity into real goods). If the value of the company continues to grow nobody ever remembers, if the value plunges, they get the short end of it. But its mostly randomness at work.
Money may be good when allocated fairly and productively, but "FU money" implies a sense of no obligation to society and in many respects is the motivating influence behind much of the ill greed rampant today. F FU money.
I believe the motivations behind things like the MacArthur 'genius' grants, the Nobel Prize, and Jefferson awards are a way to decouple a need to earn an income, from the work product. The theory goes that folks who don't have to 'work' for a living are more able to pursue their ideas, their art, and their passion. While it is true that for some folks that means they stop contributing to society at all, for others it opens up a tremendous opportunity to do great things.
Because of that I don't share your interpretation that "FU money" is correlated at all with the sense of obligation. In my world view that obligation is intrinsic in the person and not affected by the source of income. When I see the good that the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is doing, the Lucille Packard Children's hospital, and others, I think that is pretty cool.
So with his vast fortune Gates ensures that he pays the minimum required in taxes (which may support policies he disagrees with), and instead spends money on policies he supports.
If the perspective is that everything is disconnected and that you are more important than everyone else then yes, it does.
If one can see that all is connected and everything affects everything else then it makes very little sense. Those taxes pay for poor people's sustenance when they cannot work. They pay for people who can't afford private healthcare. It's rational to help them because more national unrest means more stress, less productivity and, in the end, less likelyhood of people buying your products.
The problem with being perfectly rational is that one may not consider the flaws in one's assumptions. Rationality is only as good as the information it's acting on and is not a silver bullet for making the right decisions. A blind man might conclude that while the sun may be hot at times, it's also extremely dark.
That's not what the term meant. It meant you had enough money that if you had a job you could say "Fuck you!" to your boss, his boss, the CEO, etc. and then just walk out, never come back, and live pretty well the rest of your life. (Approximately speaking.) That you didn't have to worry about your resume anymore, career, networking, keeping skills up-to-date, you never had to say yes to anything to make a buck only if it interested you, etc. It did not necessarily mean you were saying that to your neighborhood, society, country, family, etc. Indeed it could enable to give more time and energy to those things. Now, what precisely that money amount is varies of course by person, depending on their needs and desires and situation.
The point is that FU money is the point at which you have enough that you can walk away from situations that you don't agree with without that impacting the rest of your financial life in any manner.
In other words, it's retirement but at a younger age.
It's not to say you don't walk away from situations you don't agree with before you have FU money. It's just that you're at a point where it won't impact the rest of your financial life.
I don't really see why it has such a negative connotation.
/edit I should add this term is usually used in terms of someone who has spent 20+ years in a career (and typically the same company) and is at loggerheads with upper management in an unresolvable situation and is about to get forced out over the situation. i.e., upper mgmt is doing something that person believe is wrong, unethical, etc.
I'm not arguing about the opportunities money provides in this capitalistic society. I'm arguing about the power it holds over some people's moral decisions.
I don't know about your company, but where I work shorting my employer's stock is explicitly against company stock policy. It really does make sense though, you don't want allegations of insider trading going around when employees start shorting stock...
That seems extreme. If I have the option to buy shares in 6 months at price X and the stock is worth X + 10 then buying the option to sell at X + 5 in six months is simply managing risk. It's a good hedge regardless of what I think is going to happen to the company.
That might make sense, but perhaps the securities agency considers that preventing insider trading and market manipulation outweighs letting employees hedge their companies' stock. Besides, in Japanese companies non-execs typically don't get stock options anyway.
Oh it absolutely was against policy to short your own stock for just those reasons. At the time I had a restricted stock grant (pre-owned but you 'vest' over time) and ISO options, also vesting. If I had a been a bit more clever I could have sold a 'put' option on all those shares. Not worth as much as actually selling the shares would have been of course.
But really there are two points here:
1) People with a lot of equity in a single company will sell it when they can to diversify their risk (not evil)
2) People who end up with a lot of equity in a single company that is worth a lot of money are 'lucky' not necessarily 'good', 'smart', or 'evil.'
I certainly felt it raised eye brows when Pincus and other officers dumped big chunks of stock in a pre-arranged sale, but note that had Zynga continued to go up in value nobody would have blinked, but since it so spectacularly has crashed they are reviled. As bad as that looked I felt the Groupon folks turning down Google's $6B offer and instead selling their own stock through a private placement was a lot further down the scale toward 'poor judgement' than Zynga's moves.
Yeah, any sort of trading instructions, even a binding instruction like "Sell my shares a year from today, when I won't be under lock up", is considered suspect for insider trading.
A 10b-5 plan or similar is the only legally safe way to act during a quiet period.
But trading during a post-IPO employee lockup, when there is no insider information concern, maybe isn't as tight as "the week before earnings release". Seems like it shouldn't be legally. But employers certainly would order their employees not to trade.
There was a nasty loophole/scandal a few years back where people would set up a legal auto-sale plan like "Sell 1000 shares every week", and selectively cancel the plan on weeks they didn't want to transact. I'm not sure what became of that.
Actually, writing (selling) a put is the short position. Buying is the long position; you profit if the value of the put goes up (which happens when the value of the underlying stock goes down or is expected to go down).
> There was a guy at Sun whom I helped manage out of the organization, he landed a job at a start up that two months later got bought with a full vesting of everyone. He walked away with several million dollars. It took a lot of thinking about that series of events to let it sit in my head without pissing me off.
Why did that piss you off? Sounds like it was a win-win situation for you and that guy.
I haven't heard this expression before, but it sounds like he had the guy fired. He didn't like the guy, or felt that the guy wasn't functioning well in his position at Sun.
I was under the impression that he had the guy fired for being incompetent/bad had the guy not been incompetent/bad the guy wouldn't have landed a job at the start up. In a way the guy got several million dollars because of his incompetence/badness like Mr. Magoo blindly walking out of a construction site.
I don't see how the other guy getting lucky hurts the OP. He was able to improve his team at Sun by getting rid of the guy, and that guy ultimately got rich anyway.
I mostly agree with what you write. However, I have to say that, even 2 years ago, based on my somewhat limited knowledge of Zynga, I would have needed to be EXTREMELY desperate to an accept an offer from them. I left MS because I couldn't find a single product they made, aside from XBox, that I had any passion around, whatsoever. I know that I need to be fairly enthusiastic about the products or services that work on every day - the promise of a possible payout would not have been enough to get me to join an organization led by team that seems deceptive, unoriginal and unscrupulous.
Meh. It's not like Zynga's employees didn't know what Zynga was doing. And they still got a salary and (probably) benefits, which is all they should really expect anyway. Counting on stock options is a bad idea. And the job market for software developers is really good right now.
Yeah, it's a bummer they'll have to find new jobs, but I don't feel particularly bad for them.
Hard to feel sorry for ppl who chose to waste talent and time like that. They could have gone the other route and compete with zynga if they wanted better
Even big startups are hard. Zynga is startupy, even though they're public.
There's a lot of schadenfreude on HN when it comes to Zynga. Articles about Zynga's problems regularly make it to the top of HN.
Some people think games are frivolous. They're not. Entertainment is (almost) a basic human need. Some people think Zynga players are somehow being tricked. They're not. They're being entertained.
Some people say that Zynga steals ideas. Firstly, I'm guessing 99% of the people who say that are just repeating something they've heard. The other 1% should know that everyone steals from everyone. Unless you're the first guy to ever make a dynamic website, have usernames, top-bar navigation... you stole a lot of ideas too. And the ideas you stole are more fundamental than the plot of a game.
(also, if you know my history (i used to make fun of companies like this for a living) yes, i understand the irony of me writing such a supportive comment.)
Zynga is a company that makes online games. And people often criticize Zynga for making games (online games, Flash games, Facebook games, casual games, etc.)
I think most of the criticism is about how Zynga is completely devoid of creativity and originality. They're the software equivalent of Chinese shanzhai electronics manufacturers.
Calling the software that Zynga makes a "game" is insulting to real games. Zynga's are usually different skins on top of a number incrementing simulator (for example, anything with "ville" in the name), that happen to increase a little bit faster if you bug your friends (often and repeatedly) and have them increment their numbers too, and you can only increment your numbers so often - but more if you pay real cash money!
There's usually no skill, no challenge, no fun, just a bald-faced hook into the effort/reward system in the mind.
The closest thing Zynga has to real games are Bingo, Poker, and Words With Friends. I'm not even going to count that last one because they bought it from someone else.
All games can be boiled down to a one-phrase description. If you talk about real games, you can categorize them as "trick-taking" or "deck-building" and so on. The details are what make the games fun, not the basic mechanics.
(Therefore, "increment a number" games could theoretically be fun. Though I personally find them more boring than watching paint dry. At least the paint eventually dries and you can move on to something else.)
>Calling the software that Zynga makes a "game" is insulting to real games.
No True Scotsman fallacy. Just because you don't think they're games doesn't make it fact. They make games, and people criticize them for it. The only thing your post did was help better prove OP's point.
>They make games, and people criticize them for it.
First, Zynga is not criticized for making games, they're criticized for making Skinner boxes and passing them off as games. Quality, in other words.
Second, just because you think they make games doesn't make it fact.
Definition of a game per Google:
A form of play or sport, esp. a competitive one played according to rules and decided by skill, strength, or luck.
Zynga's "games" (with very few exceptions) lack any form of skill, strength, or luck. Push button, receive reward, pay us cash or spam your friends and you can push the button more often.
That is literally all there is to most Zynga games. I'm not even engaging in hyperbole here! Compare with even the most grindtastic MMO's out there, even the most rehashed FPS or football franchise you can think of, and there's still a skill component that these wannabes can't grok.
> Definition of a game per Google:
> A form of play or sport, esp. a competitive one played according to rules and decided by skill, strength, or luck.
Resorting to a dictionary definition to argue a point is nearly always a sign you've got a weak argument. But in this case, I want to point out the "esp." just after the first comma in the definition you cite.
It means especially. In context, that means that games need not adhere to the conditions specified in the subordinate clause.
Also, I swear Wittgenstein had something to say on this topic.
>Resorting to a dictionary definition to argue a point is nearly always a sign you've got a weak argument.
Or a sign that your opponent is redefining words to fit their argument instead of using the commonly accepted one. Are you telling me it's unfair to refer to an authoritative source as to the meaning of a word?
In any case, there has to be some kind of definition or else the word becomes meaningless. By defining Farmville as a "game", you could just as easily define twiddling numbers on an Excel sheet as a "game". Where do you stop? Is Farmville a game just because it has a pretty skin?
> Are you telling me it's unfair to refer to an authoritative source as to the meaning of a word?
Unfair, no. A sign that the argument is weak, yes. Particularly in this case.
Also, use is meaning. Dictionaries are authoritative only in the sense that they capture current use at the time of publication. Even in that case, they're often lacking in some word senses and/or connotation because they don't exist in the writer's dialect.
>By defining Farmville as a "game", you could just as easily define twiddling numbers on an Excel sheet as a "game".
Are you twiddling the numbers as a form of play? Then yes, that'd be a game according to the definition given above. Games don't need to be challenging, or even all that entertaining.
It is, at least for me, more just transparent snobbery than the No True Scotsman fallacy. The same way some video game journalists don't like to cover Minecraft, as it's "not a real video game".
Or it's an interpretation that the motives of the creator are important.
In my mind, Zynga "games" are to games what crack dealers are to entrepreneurs. It may be a subset, but it's a subset about which I believe quite firmly that those that participate should be shunned. They are an unethical company that produce products that I can describe only as predatory.
(And, yes, World of Warcraft falls in the same bucket.)
Side discussion concerning the No True Scotsman fallacy. If 100/100 people agreed with "A", does the fallacy still apply? Can you say "just because everyone thinks 'X' doesn't make it fact"^?
^I know that people believing something doesn't define facts - in this case I'm wondering if the fallacy would still apply.
Except that, at least in my case, no such change was made. I took the definition I used directly from a dictionary. It looks like in this case someone is trying really hard to shout down an argument as fallacy when no such error is being made.
I'm sorry but I have to disagree. My mom used to play some tropical island game. She told me that she loved hearing the waves crash as she "landed on her island". For her, that game was every bit as entertaining as Borderlands 2 is for some hardcore console gamer.
I view Zynga roughly the same way I'd view a casino where nobody ever booked a win. The parallels are strong, right down to Hosts for Whales who blow $10k+ while playing.
I'm happy to see them fail because I firmly believe they violate the tenet that entities should create more value than they capture.
I agree with the almost all your points except about them stealing ideas. Ripping off the same game from indie developers is wrong. It isn't them using basic ideas like a top nav or usernames, there are examples of them copying entire games[1].
1. http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2012/01/25/everything...
My argument is that Zynga stole another band's style and lyrics but changed the presentation slightly. They did not build on the 'basic ideas' like having a certain set of instruments.
Games are not frivolous. Games are an incredible opportunity for artistic expression, self-expression (for players), exploration of complicated topics, and overall fun.
But Zynga doesn't make games. They make shitty frontends on a spreadsheet.
As to their theft of products, that's not hearsay. That's an ongoing, provable patterns of behavior:
Nobody steals like zynga. The worst part, they steal from small , non-VC-or-SV-connected indie developers and then they sue them. If they were in china or Russia, everyone would call them scum.
I feel bad for all the Zynga people. Not for being so unceremoniously let go, but for the flood of recruiting emails they'll be receiving already. Good luck, people!
Go to any developer meetup here in Austin and you'll find plenty of companies hiring. There are 50 startups here at Capital Factory (many funded) in downtown Austin and most of us are hiring. No one with decent talent at Zynga will have any problems finding another job here in Austin.
If any of the Zynga engineers are reading this article, we are looking for a few good engineers where I work. We develop with Unity3d and Obj-c for the front end, and Scala for the back end. We also are willing to consider remote for great candidates.
Why don't you guys put some stuff up on your website? Every section is just empty. As an indie game developer using Unity3d (and funnily enough an ex-Zynga employee too) I wouldn't even bother contacting your studio when every section of your site is just empty.
Are you really willing to consider remote? What I find is that when someone makes a statement like "willing to consider" it means that they have no experience trying it, and aren't interested in making the changes to the company structure and culture to make remote work really possible for the long-term.
Is anyone else unable to access the article? I'm getting 404s - although this exact url is linked from the front page. It's techcrunch, so this must be a sign of interesting politic.
It seems to me that Zynga's biggest mistake was 1) not expecting that social gaming craze to take a dive and 2) not figuring out early enough what to do next when the social gaming craze died down ... those two things are related.
So rather than predicting and pre-empting the dive in social gaming, Zynga is in a tough situation where they're facing the harsh reality as it comes. As a result, they're stuck with a huge, bloated company not prepared to quickly pivot or create innovation in new product categories.
I don't know what else Zynga can do right now but to downsize and to refocus the company on building what's next and not what was. It's almost like they need to find a new product strategy and business model. And it will take a lot of insight, leadership and team to get it done.
What they have going for them is that they have a lot of cash and a lot of experience in the social gaming genre.
But what they have going against them is momentum which includes employees losing faith in the company.
>"So rather than predicting and pre-empting the dive in social gaming"
I agree with your post, outside of this.
They most definitely predicted it, and cashed out their stock to benefit from it. How else do you explain them cashing out so much, so early? That's the hard part for me to get over.
Other than the shadiness of the VCs and execs, Zynga was a decent idea that didn't work out, like so many before it.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 284 ms ] threadThis is a theme that exists throughout most Zynga games.
or pay cash and continue immediately.
What disappoints me about the current social gaming genre is how many games what would have otherwise been decent tycoons are ruined with slot machine mechanics.
You're the first person I've "met" who got SimIsle. Maybe I need to give it another try...
Happy Farm was legitimately a social game - even further than Farmville ended up being. In fact, almost two thirds of the Chinese population that played admitted they did so only so they could steal crops from their friends.
It's almost a case study into the Chinese culture unto itself.
http://www.theverge.com/
Top bar is all Apple. Zynga story is an entire page scroll down.
Not sure what you mean by "top bar", but there's a Windows 8 Review above the fold.
Also, remember that the Zynga story is "From Polygon" (Polygon is The Verge's sister gaming site), so it wouldn't be at the top regardless.
Or because the White House doesn't make important news announcements on Christmas Eve when nobody's paying attention...
I don't think this is a Zynga dick-move. I think this is a typical company move to bury a non-flattering story.
There are many things one might accurately criticize Zynga for, but this is not one of them. If they hadn't done it this way investors would have yet another reason to sell the stock, it would be evidence the company is run by idiots.
Would you have acted differently?
Practically, though, bad Zynga news feels terrible. Because the guys who architected this repugnant exploitation machine already got paid. They made millions selling their stock before the market truly understood what a shit business they were running. Meanwhile, front-line employees sat with their plummeting stock locked up.
So any bad Zynga news is nothing more than notice that yet another group of hardworking folks is, somehow, getting fucked over, despite their leadership enjoying tremendous rewards.
Very frustrating to watch.
I think if you work for a screwy company like Zynga you should be very paranoid about cashing out of the company. If they have such a low opinion of their customers, who is to say they won't have the same sentiment towards their employees.
Anyone remember this from almost a year ago? http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-57322150-17/zynga-to-emplo...
I get the distinct impression Zynga only has a high opinion of money.
How did that ever pan out? Were employees forced to renounce their prior options grants, or did the pressure change management's mind on this?
Otherwise, yes, Zynga's present situation's been a long time coming, pity it's the bastards who made off like bandits.
Also > (with all that tracing going on...)
:D
Take patio11's advice and go into B2B, you'll make money hand over fist with much more manageable working hours.
Not everyone in the industry is scum, though it's certainly not uncommon.
I know several people working quite happily at gaming companies (doing, from what I can see, some pretty cool stuff), and those game companies who are the most abusive generally have well-known reputations as such.
I suppose it might not be the best industry to go into straight out of college, when you have little leverage and lack industry smarts...
That means that there is a much more abundant supply of labour and that the demand side is exploiting this by offering lower wages, worse working environment, crazier hours etc.
The main difference between fashion, music and art is that the discrepancy is much more poignant in the games industry because there's an abundant supply of well-paying cushy jobs just around the corner which involve almost the exact same skill-set to compare against.
The games industry is an industry of love; just like fashion, music and theater are for example.
That means that there is a much more abundant supply of labour and that the demand side is exploiting this by offering lower wages, worse working environment, crazier hours etc.
The main difference between market industries like fashion, music and art is that the discrepancy is much more poignant in games because there's an abundant supply of well-paying cushy jobs which involve almost the exact same skill-set to compare against.
I hope this is just an isolated incident of bad company strategy than an overall industry trend.
I also feel unnerved when I see unsustainable companies go on unsustainable hiring binges. It's like the first scene in a horror movie. Are you crazy? Don't go in there! He'll kill you!
My startup is based out of Capital Factory, and if you even just walked in the door during Friday happy hour and announced that you were a developer here in Austin looking for a job, hungry funded startup owners would descend on you like wolves.
All that to say: You have nothing to be worried about. And also, come to more events...especially ones held at Capital Factory. :)
Both employ game dynamics to get participants to part with their money - the only difference being that casinos require you to pay up front, and Zynga doesn't have the same level of overhead.
The company will only face a race to the bottom, though, as others enter this space and competition for user time ramps up.
Your last sentence will probably hold true, unless they start producing something innovative and useful for a change..
It will be interesting to see if management bails from Zynga over the coming quarters. Personally, I would watch and see if management unloads on any stock or options.
So - to some degree, the crash and possible termination of Zynga's business model, enables these people to escape the company. If the stock had value, then they would be trapped in that really horrible (for some of them) career. When the stock has no value - they are all now free(er) to go - no handcuffs.
Glad the decision to leave is easier, at least.
Their conviction was greater than the potential wealth and very commendable.
Your comment insinuates that these employees had no morals and were freed by the failure.
This is actually a fucked up position.
There are many factors that play into this, the most significant of which is the employees living paycheck to paycheck where they cannot actually leave on a high ground position due to their needing the money... and your point is that "well, at least the company failed freeing them of any moral risk of staying with the company should it have succeeded and trapped them with lucrative options!"
To this I say, fully and openly:
Fuck every single thing about Zynga and the attitudes and policies it may beget.
FUCK ZYNGA
and I have zero sympathy for any of its employees in any regard.
I have been openly decrying this company for years - and I still will - I can't stand such bullshit in any industry and Silicon Valley should SHUN them and be ashamed of every relation to this company.
We are trying to make a better world here, aren't we folks?
If not, then fuck you - because if your goal is only self-enrichment then I despise you.
What if the Zynga employee/s in question had not a moral objection to virtual cow trade, but a mild distaste?
You can work in an industry that you think is kind of stupid, but not morally offensive.
This is totally separate from the issue of working for a company that steals other people's work as a matter of course, which was not addressed here.
Understand there is a difference between working for a lame company, and a morally objectionable company.
I could make an argument that what Zynga did with Tiny Towers/Dream Heights wasn't that much different than what Samsung did with it's Galaxy Tab/iPad. In both cases, these companies took another product as an example, and put their own spin on it.
Neither of them is really "morally reprehensible" - but, if you want to do original work, or make the world a better place, there are probably other places you can work - and taking money out of the equations makes it that much easier.
On the money thing though you really need to come to terms with the fact that there is way more random chance than there is earned riches in the tech business. For every person who got rich being the most brilliant mind on the problem at the right time, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of people who got rich just because who ever was sitting in the seat they happened to be sitting in also got rich. The folks who just happened to be at Sun when it founded, or HP, or Google, or FaceBook. Randomness, not skill, plays a huge role there. There was a guy at Sun whom I helped manage out of the organization, he landed a job at a start up that two months later got bought with a full vesting of everyone. He walked away with several million dollars. It took a lot of thinking about that series of events to let it sit in my head without pissing me off.
Different people exploit their opportunities differently. I know that if I both knew how, and could have, shorted stock I held but was locked up but worth 'millions' I would have. I would have said "That's enough for me, sell it all, and when it dribbles out via my acquisition contract timed unlock I'll hand over the shares." That would have made me 'evil' in the eyes of the shareholders who bought stock during that time (and later sued the company) but my motivation would have been quite pure (FU money is a good thing). But I don't think of myself as an evil guy, and generally am pretty nice.
Bottom line is people with large holdings in a startup will look to 'liquify' a chunk of that to diversify and allow them to activate the wealth 'ratchet' (that is where you solidify your position by converting equity into real goods). If the value of the company continues to grow nobody ever remembers, if the value plunges, they get the short end of it. But its mostly randomness at work.
Because of that I don't share your interpretation that "FU money" is correlated at all with the sense of obligation. In my world view that obligation is intrinsic in the person and not affected by the source of income. When I see the good that the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is doing, the Lucille Packard Children's hospital, and others, I think that is pretty cool.
[1] http://www.macfound.org/programs/fellows/
[2] http://www.nobelprize.org/
[3] http://www.jeffersonawards.org/
See: http://techrights.org/wiki/index.php/Gates_Foundation_Critiq...
So with his vast fortune Gates ensures that he pays the minimum required in taxes (which may support policies he disagrees with), and instead spends money on policies he supports.
That sounds perfectly rational.
If the perspective is that everything is disconnected and that you are more important than everyone else then yes, it does.
If one can see that all is connected and everything affects everything else then it makes very little sense. Those taxes pay for poor people's sustenance when they cannot work. They pay for people who can't afford private healthcare. It's rational to help them because more national unrest means more stress, less productivity and, in the end, less likelyhood of people buying your products.
The problem with being perfectly rational is that one may not consider the flaws in one's assumptions. Rationality is only as good as the information it's acting on and is not a silver bullet for making the right decisions. A blind man might conclude that while the sun may be hot at times, it's also extremely dark.
The point is that FU money is the point at which you have enough that you can walk away from situations that you don't agree with without that impacting the rest of your financial life in any manner.
In other words, it's retirement but at a younger age.
It's not to say you don't walk away from situations you don't agree with before you have FU money. It's just that you're at a point where it won't impact the rest of your financial life.
I don't really see why it has such a negative connotation.
/edit I should add this term is usually used in terms of someone who has spent 20+ years in a career (and typically the same company) and is at loggerheads with upper management in an unresolvable situation and is about to get forced out over the situation. i.e., upper mgmt is doing something that person believe is wrong, unethical, etc.
But really there are two points here:
1) People with a lot of equity in a single company will sell it when they can to diversify their risk (not evil)
2) People who end up with a lot of equity in a single company that is worth a lot of money are 'lucky' not necessarily 'good', 'smart', or 'evil.'
I certainly felt it raised eye brows when Pincus and other officers dumped big chunks of stock in a pre-arranged sale, but note that had Zynga continued to go up in value nobody would have blinked, but since it so spectacularly has crashed they are reviled. As bad as that looked I felt the Groupon folks turning down Google's $6B offer and instead selling their own stock through a private placement was a lot further down the scale toward 'poor judgement' than Zynga's moves.
I totally agree with point #1 though. People should be able to diversify their risk.
A 10b-5 plan or similar is the only legally safe way to act during a quiet period.
But trading during a post-IPO employee lockup, when there is no insider information concern, maybe isn't as tight as "the week before earnings release". Seems like it shouldn't be legally. But employers certainly would order their employees not to trade.
There was a nasty loophole/scandal a few years back where people would set up a legal auto-sale plan like "Sell 1000 shares every week", and selectively cancel the plan on weeks they didn't want to transact. I'm not sure what became of that.
Why did that piss you off? Sounds like it was a win-win situation for you and that guy.
I haven't heard this expression before, but it sounds like he had the guy fired. He didn't like the guy, or felt that the guy wasn't functioning well in his position at Sun.
Yeah, it's a bummer they'll have to find new jobs, but I don't feel particularly bad for them.
Even big startups are hard. Zynga is startupy, even though they're public.
There's a lot of schadenfreude on HN when it comes to Zynga. Articles about Zynga's problems regularly make it to the top of HN.
Some people think games are frivolous. They're not. Entertainment is (almost) a basic human need. Some people think Zynga players are somehow being tricked. They're not. They're being entertained.
Some people say that Zynga steals ideas. Firstly, I'm guessing 99% of the people who say that are just repeating something they've heard. The other 1% should know that everyone steals from everyone. Unless you're the first guy to ever make a dynamic website, have usernames, top-bar navigation... you stole a lot of ideas too. And the ideas you stole are more fundamental than the plot of a game.
(also, if you know my history (i used to make fun of companies like this for a living) yes, i understand the irony of me writing such a supportive comment.)
I love games and don't think they are frivolous for a moment. I'm not sure what that has to do with a discussion of Zynga, though.
There's usually no skill, no challenge, no fun, just a bald-faced hook into the effort/reward system in the mind.
The closest thing Zynga has to real games are Bingo, Poker, and Words With Friends. I'm not even going to count that last one because they bought it from someone else.
(Therefore, "increment a number" games could theoretically be fun. Though I personally find them more boring than watching paint dry. At least the paint eventually dries and you can move on to something else.)
No True Scotsman fallacy. Just because you don't think they're games doesn't make it fact. They make games, and people criticize them for it. The only thing your post did was help better prove OP's point.
First, Zynga is not criticized for making games, they're criticized for making Skinner boxes and passing them off as games. Quality, in other words.
Second, just because you think they make games doesn't make it fact.
Definition of a game per Google:
A form of play or sport, esp. a competitive one played according to rules and decided by skill, strength, or luck.
Zynga's "games" (with very few exceptions) lack any form of skill, strength, or luck. Push button, receive reward, pay us cash or spam your friends and you can push the button more often.
That is literally all there is to most Zynga games. I'm not even engaging in hyperbole here! Compare with even the most grindtastic MMO's out there, even the most rehashed FPS or football franchise you can think of, and there's still a skill component that these wannabes can't grok.
Resorting to a dictionary definition to argue a point is nearly always a sign you've got a weak argument. But in this case, I want to point out the "esp." just after the first comma in the definition you cite.
It means especially. In context, that means that games need not adhere to the conditions specified in the subordinate clause.
Also, I swear Wittgenstein had something to say on this topic.
Or a sign that your opponent is redefining words to fit their argument instead of using the commonly accepted one. Are you telling me it's unfair to refer to an authoritative source as to the meaning of a word?
In any case, there has to be some kind of definition or else the word becomes meaningless. By defining Farmville as a "game", you could just as easily define twiddling numbers on an Excel sheet as a "game". Where do you stop? Is Farmville a game just because it has a pretty skin?
Unfair, no. A sign that the argument is weak, yes. Particularly in this case.
Also, use is meaning. Dictionaries are authoritative only in the sense that they capture current use at the time of publication. Even in that case, they're often lacking in some word senses and/or connotation because they don't exist in the writer's dialect.
>By defining Farmville as a "game", you could just as easily define twiddling numbers on an Excel sheet as a "game".
Are you twiddling the numbers as a form of play? Then yes, that'd be a game according to the definition given above. Games don't need to be challenging, or even all that entertaining.
It is, at least for me, more just transparent snobbery than the No True Scotsman fallacy. The same way some video game journalists don't like to cover Minecraft, as it's "not a real video game".
In my mind, Zynga "games" are to games what crack dealers are to entrepreneurs. It may be a subset, but it's a subset about which I believe quite firmly that those that participate should be shunned. They are an unethical company that produce products that I can describe only as predatory.
(And, yes, World of Warcraft falls in the same bucket.)
^I know that people believing something doesn't define facts - in this case I'm wondering if the fallacy would still apply.
The fallacy is when you keep changing the definition to fit the data.
I'm happy to see them fail because I firmly believe they violate the tenet that entities should create more value than they capture.
That's not why people criticize Zynga, and I think you probably know that.
BTW did you hear about the dot-commies?
They thought they had a right to everyone else's money.
By "basic ideas" I assume you mean "ideas that are better and more useful, and therefore more widely ripped off."
Your argument reminds me of when people say such-and-such band is so original -- yet it's another four guys playing guitar, bass, drums and vocals.
But Zynga doesn't make games. They make shitty frontends on a spreadsheet.
As to their theft of products, that's not hearsay. That's an ongoing, provable patterns of behavior:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2012/01/25/everything...
This is an absurd justification for the kind of outright theft Zynga has built an entire public corporation on.
https://twitter.com/search/realtime?q=zynga+%22ping+me%22+OR...
This concerns me because this is Zyngas leadership tone on display. It does not invoke confidence.
careers@bentoboxinteractive.com
So rather than predicting and pre-empting the dive in social gaming, Zynga is in a tough situation where they're facing the harsh reality as it comes. As a result, they're stuck with a huge, bloated company not prepared to quickly pivot or create innovation in new product categories.
I don't know what else Zynga can do right now but to downsize and to refocus the company on building what's next and not what was. It's almost like they need to find a new product strategy and business model. And it will take a lot of insight, leadership and team to get it done.
What they have going for them is that they have a lot of cash and a lot of experience in the social gaming genre.
But what they have going against them is momentum which includes employees losing faith in the company.
I agree with your post, outside of this.
They most definitely predicted it, and cashed out their stock to benefit from it. How else do you explain them cashing out so much, so early? That's the hard part for me to get over.
Other than the shadiness of the VCs and execs, Zynga was a decent idea that didn't work out, like so many before it.