Explain.

Zygna (of FarmVille fame) has one of the most sophisticated testing and metrics operations on the Internet today. From externally observable evidence they're probably better at it than WoW and WoW is large enough to be its own national economy. (Zynga is a lot like IMVU or for that matter Toyota: I don't care if you have no interest in their product, their processes are worthy of study.)

They aren't just throwing dung at the wall and seeing what sticks: they're very, very good at what they do. For every FarmVille there are tens of thousands of games which you have never heard of: their viral growth coefficient was .95 instead of 1.05, kaboom, that is all you need to fail. The platform is getting harder to develop for, as early entrants used techniques which were what SEOs might call "a wee bit grey" to gain traction, and these are either impossible now or will result in a new entrant getting hit with the banhammer. (For example, early social games maximized their viral coefficient by adopting a spam-early spam-often policy to user notifications, which ticked off a lot of Facebook users, causing Facebook to take a number of countermeasures. Ask somebody who builds for it to describe the specifics, but there are now throttles and some sort of system where you earn the right to use the viral channels.)

"Ask somebody who builds for it to describe the specifics, but there are now throttles and some sort of system where you earn the right to use the viral channels."

All of that is going away in five days. No more requests, no more notifications, etc.

Nobody knows what will happen! Pandemonium! Haha.

Memo to self: add "Do not build for platforms which could pull the rug from under you" to list of tips for founders with day jobs. That sort of thing would crunch my business like a tin can if it happened to me in the wrong week. (Actually, I think all weeks are the wrong week for something that big.)

Facebook has done this at least three times previously. This time was better than previous because they actually laid out a roadmap with specific dates.

http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Developer_Road...

So, anyone who hasn't factored this into the development model yet is, well, dead or going to die the next time it happens. :)

This is why the game I'm currently working on is built using facebook iframe/connect, and not fbml; the thinking being that this product should be able to stand on it's own merit regardless of which API i mash into it.

Are there good explanations of their process, etc. online somewhere? Your paragraph description is tantalizing but a bit spare.

I don't have a good one-stop "Here's everything people outside the company know about Zynga" resource in mind, but my two secrets for keeping a finger on the pulse of social gaming are a) andrewchenblog.com (though he doesn't blog much anymore, which saddens me because it frustrates my hunger for testing/metrics inspiration) and b) Slideshare (It is amazing what goodies people give away at conference presentations and a huge portion of them eventually migrate to Slideshare.)

I can't really speak for social games but I can elaborate on the casual side of gaming .... when we upload to sites like Kongregate and Newgrounds we submit ourselves to the mercy of a very vast, very diverse, very easily unsatisfied and very unappreciative audience ... and we need about 8 out of 10 people to like our game, and there's no second chance.

Sometimes only a handful of games satisfy these requirements a month, out of 100+ a day.

Social games I imagine are much the same .... you have to get a lot of things right first time, and your list of things that were right yesterday aren't necessarily so right today.

Really a lot of things are the same ... the difference between making a product your friends like vs. your town vs. your city vs. your state vs. your country vs. the whole world .... probably far below 1% of 1% of 'stuff' makes it to the top.

As someone on who has been on the side of social games for a long time, it's absolutely not about getting it right the first time.

It has always been about two things - getting lucky, and moving fast.

Playfish tried to do a lot of games "right the first time" but weren't set up to quickly fix their mistakes and have ended up performing terribly.

That's an interesting difference ... with casual games we have a really short window of opportunity to execute significant change.

On ratings-focused sites like Kongregate and Newgrounds we might literally only have hours to measure, judge and react to feedback and bugs before our game slips off the new games page or the ratings-damage is too great to recover from. And that's if we're lucky enough to be given a reason why "this game sucks 1/5" heh.

On the rest of the internet we have the issue of games being distributed beyond our control, once a game goes 'wild' it gets to 100s of sites and there's really only a couple of options for pushing out updates - hot load an x megabyte swf to millions, or Mochi's LiveUpdate system which requires their ads (sometimes we're not allowed to use ads).

He seems to discount the difficulty in harnessing the virality of Facebook, especially now with the locked down channels. I think virality is far harder to get right than good art, or a good story, or good game mechanics.