If you have been through the social networking sites, you must have heard about social games like FarmVille, FrontierVille or City-Ville. Have you wondered how the dogs got into the net? It was all Zynga’s idea.
Thanks to the entrepreneurial skills of its founder and CEO Mark Pincus who established the company in Potrero Hill in San Francisco. Its headquarters has 13 “studios” where engineers and designers crowd together for Zynga’s 11 popular online games.
Pincus developed the concept in December of 2006. The idea was to develop an asynchronous online game where people can play with real-world friends. The games would hitch on social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace. The whole idea was untested and considered as freak by many of Pincus’ critics.
After his idea was dropped many times, he used a marketing strategy that really worked. Zynga’s are not all about games; it’s about the “social.” With games Zynga has birthed, people from all across the globe have 15 minutes of not only connecting but playing with their folks.
To maintain its fair share of the market, Zynga built an analytics engine which measures every aspect of gaming experience. The goal was to evaluate the users’ behavior in support of Pincus’ effort to improve every game everyday. Pincus believes that its edge is not only about the features but the right social experience.
The analytics provided them with data, such as, which features are more popular, which day of the week people prefer to play; which age group play the longest; and which demographic level invites more people to join the games. They use these precious data to create new game elements. There are hundreds of tests running in every game each day.
No one believed Pincus could become a CEO of a $50-million revenue company. The company is worth $500 million in 2010. Its most popular game City-Ville has about 84.2 million active monthly users. Pincus sees an even loftier opportunity ahead. He vows to improve the games because in five years, there is an expected 2 billion social gamers all around the world.
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