How Big Can a Maker of Online Video Games Get?

If you watched any kid play FarmVille or Mafia Wars on Facebook recently and found yourself growing in anxiety at the insaneness of it all, here's a bit of news that should not do anything to help with it - Zynga, the company behind these smash hits, is being touted as a soon-to-become Google of gaming on the Internet.

Zynga is being trumpeted as the biggest startup in Silicon Valley since Twitter and Facebook. There is one small difference there - while Twitter is a great concept that helps connect people, it doesn't really make much in revenues overwatch hacks. FarmVille on the other hand is set to a rake in a half billion dollars in revenue this year alone, selling fake fertilizer and farm animals. To think that anyone could make that kind of money on a free Facebook game is quite staggering. If they began to charge something off every player, they would probably grow even faster. And to think that they have grown to this stage in a mere two years.

There can be problems that can attend such growth rates though. Some players sign up to have everything they do on their virtual farms sent to their friends as a Facebook update. That can be quite tiring for the receivers of those updates. Millions of Facebook users recently banded together to join a group called "I don't care about your farm". So, is Zynga the only maker of hit online video games on Facebook? There are lots of players out there who would like to repeat Zynga's success for themselves.

The childishly simple characters and plots of Zynga's games that rake in much more money than traditional high-tech video games, have the gaming industry a little peeved. But they aren't about to sit on the sidelines and watch these new developers enjoy all the action. Electronic Arts, the maker of some great titles for the PlayStation and Xbox 360 has just bought Playfish, a Zynga competitor, for a half billion dollars, to establish itself in this new gaming environment.

There was a child in the news recently who went and emptied his mother's credit card of thousands of dollars to buy FarmVille merchandise; several FarmVille subscribers have launched a class action lawsuit against Zynga for the way it has signed them on for costly services that they did not ever ask for. It is all part of becoming successful quickly in a world of cutthroat competition. In the symbiotic relationship that Facebook and Zynga enjoy, who needs whom more, some people ask. One thing's pretty clear - about a third of all visitors to Facebook come there exclusively to play the games. It would be pretty easy to speculate that they both needed each other.

Report this Page