What Happens to all those Clicks in Mafia Wars and Farmville?

On Friday, Michael Arrington (Techcrunch founder) asked a deliberately provocative question to a monetization panel at GDC. The panel consisted of representatives from 4 of the largest social game developers - Zynga, Playfish, Playdom, Crowdstar. The question was 'why do Facebook games suck?'

The question was somewhat tongue in cheek. Zynga's games (Mafia Wars, Poker, Farmville) alone have around 50 million daily actives on Facebook and growing. Not bad for shallow games with little if any animation.

I don't think Zynga really cares that their games are not considered groundbreaking within the video game industry. For me Zynga is not a game development company. If we are looking for a parallel I think Zynga is closer to Google than EA.

Zynga is renowned for copying successful mass market game formats, e.g. Poker and Mafia Wars. For Zynga the important thing is reach. The games it develops need to have broad based appeal. They minimize the cost of collecting data by adapting proven game formats from other industries or other games companies. The goal is a large audience and hence more data rather than prizes at gaming awards.

Zynga collects vast amounts of behavioural data about its gaming customers. It then analyses this data to optimise game play, virality, sales of virtual goods and increasingly to drive targeted advertising. This becomes a positive feedback loop that drives usage and increases the data available to analyse. Google works in a very similar way with search data.

My prediction is that we will see more advertising related products coming out of Zynga in the near future. Perhaps a social media equivalent of Google Adwords and Adsense. The growth of Facebook connects will allow Zynga to leverage its vast database to provide targeted advertising across the Internet, not just on Facebook.