Social games at the chips factory

Mack Pinkas with his dog Zynga.



'FriendSHIP means being able to sink each other's battleSHIPs'. (A pun: “Friendship is when you can sink cruisers to each other”).



So says an entrepreneur from Silicon Valley, Mac Pinkas (Mark Pincus), the organizer of several startups, including Support.com and one of the early social networks Tribe.net . On Tuesday, Mr. Pinkas broke the veil of secrecy from his next project, Zynga Game Network. This is a company that develops online games for posting on pages of popular sites like Facebook and MySpace.



Zynga, which consists of 27 employees, has literally reinvented card games such as poker, point, as well as classic games like Risk, Boggle and Sea Battle for the last few months. Social network members can place the game in their profile and play it right there with other visitors.

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Games, namely the version of Texas Poker from Zynga, have already interested hundreds of thousands of regular users. This, as well as other similar companies, are confident that on the body of fast-growing social networks you can build a real business. Last year, these networks invited entrepreneurs to arrange all sorts of entertainment for their impressive audience and receive their share of advertising revenue.



It is not yet clear whether it is possible to earn this way for a long time, however many people decided to try their luck. From the moment when Facebook opened its code for third-party developers in May, about 7,000 applications were submitted and more than 80 percent of its users added at least one of them to their pages. Seasonal companies and small start-ups began to actively develop various applications for Facebook and other sites, including MySpace, which also promises to open up to third-party developers at the beginning of this year.



Zynga specializes in so-called casual games that do not require special study of the rules and are especially popular among those who have little time for games and who have never heard of toys such as Halo.



“People already love casual games,” says Fred Wilson, a partner at Union Square Ventures, a venture company that provided $ 10 million in funding for Zynga. “But when you take a casual game and put it on a social network, it’s become even more fascinating. It’s like splashing oil on fire. ”



Mr. Pinkas is another seasonal entrepreneur who made big bets on Mac Zuckerberg (Mark Zuckerberg), the 23-year-old founder of Facebook and his idea of ​​a “social graph”. The idea is that gaming applications become more attractive and spread across the network even faster if friends, relatives or colleagues start to get involved.



“I myself am not a big fan of playing,” says Mr. Pinkas, 41 years old. “But I may well be representative of the market I am engaged in. I practically have no time for games, but this could be a really good way to maintain a relationship with my niece, for example. ”



The company is located on the territory of a former potato chip factory in the suburb of San Francisco. Mr. Pinkas, founder of Support.com, a service now called SupportSoft, and who sold part of Tribe.net's assets to Cisco Systems last year bought this building to house his company. In addition, he is one of those who, at a very early stage, invested in Facebook.



Other Zynga investors include such outstanding Silicon Valley figures as Peter Thiel, investor and board member of Facebook, Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn founder and Robert W. Pittman, one of the former America Online executives.



We can hardly say that Zynga is involved in rare games. For example, when Zynga introduced its version of Texas Poker in July, there were already several versions of the same game on Facebook. The trick is that the company develops its games specifically for the interactive features of Facebook. For example, users can invite their friends into the game, or see who is currently playing, and join him right in the game.



Among the immediate plans Zynga, link their virtual resources into one. Starting this week, all users who join one of their games automatically get access to a special community, where they can chat with each other and communicate with other users who also play Zynga games even on other social platforms.

The company hopes that once, traditional advertisers will resort to its services, but in the meantime, the company earns by selling advertisements to creators of other applications who are trying to attract new users. Zynga takes 50 cents from advertisers every time one of its players installs an advertising application. For this, Zynga promises its users special rewards; for example, players in points receive additional points for clicking on a certain link. Mr. Pinkas says that players click on 50,000 such links every day, many of which also lead to other Zynga games.



Now Zynga has more than a dozen games and intends to continue to produce 4-8 games a month. All of them are far behind the popularity of Scrabulous, a clone of the Scrabble game, which is now among the most popular games on Facebook, with an audience of half a million active users.



Mr. Pinkas says he prefers to avoid problems with trademarks. Zynga gave its version of Risk the name Attack, and its version of Boggle called “Scramble”. Mr. Pinkas says that the company may be interested in licensing gaming trademarks or cooperation with traditional game makers.



Evan Wilson, an analyst at Pacific Crest Securities, says that the online gaming industry is teeming with clones, which, however, does not cause any problems with the law if those who rip them use other names and a different technology.



Mr. Wilson thinks that if companies like Zynga succeed in proving the success of their business model, then monsters like Electronic Arts, which owns the Hasbro license for the electronics industry, immediately rush into this market.



Mr. Pinkas is counting on that. He is confident that his company's products, which are in the top among the “most popular applications” on sites like Facebook, can become valuable resources.



According to him, other game makers: “will be forced to either release their game and stand in a queue of 1300 other games, in the hope that they will be noticed, or turn to us for help”.



Translation from English:

Roman Rabwe for worldwebstudio.livejournal.com