zynga case study

A business journal from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

Is Zynga’s Dependence on Facebook the Key to Its Success — Or Its Downfall?

August 3, 2011 • 10 min read.

By most measures, Zynga -- creator of social games such as FarmVille and Mafia Wars -- is a success. The company is profitable and attracts millions of users each day. But the solid business has one potentially fatal flaw -- its dependence on Facebook's platform and user base. Can Zynga, which recently filed for an IPO, diversify beyond the social network? And does it need to, as the Internet world becomes increasingly interconnected?

By most measures, Zynga — creator of social games such as FarmVille and Mafia Wars — is a success. The profitable company has users in 166 countries and 60 million daily active users who engage in two billion minutes of play a day. But this otherwise solid business has a potentially fatal flaw — its dependence on Facebook’s platform and user base. While Zynga was able to get broad distribution with little upfront investment by partnering with Facebook, there are disadvantages to their intimate relationship since Zynga’s fate is largely in the hands of Facebook. “It is critical in the long-term for Zynga to diversify beyond Facebook,” says Kartik Hosanagar , an operations and information management professor at Wharton.

Yet, according to Kevin Werbach , a Wharton legal studies and business ethics professor, Zynga represents what could be the dominant business model for the future digital world, a strategy that revolves around what he calls “real-time value webs.”

“We’re seeing that model play out today with the rise of digital platforms such as Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon.com. They are offering services to customers directly, but also providing the infrastructure for ecosystems of other companies,” Werbach notes. “In a digital era, everything is potentially interconnected. Companies are no longer isolated islands.”

For Zynga, this interconnected business model means it can grow faster. The company, which recently filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering, reported net income of $90.59 million on revenue of $597.5 million for 2010. For the three months ended March 31, Zynga reported net income of $11.8 million on revenue of $235.4 million. In 2009, Zynga lost $52.8 million on revenue of $121.5 million. Like a number of other recent start-ups, Zynga has built its technology infrastructure on Amazon Web Services, which sells computing power by the hour.

The challenge of co-dependent business models is that firms have to pick and choose partners carefully, Werbach suggests, noting that Zynga and Facebook are two companies that need each other — at least for now.

Zynga’s leadership team outlined the risks in the firm’s regulatory filings, acknowledging that its business today largely depends on Facebook. “We generate substantially all of our revenue and players through the Facebook platform and expect to continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Any deterioration in our relationship with Facebook would harm our business,” according to Zynga’s IPO filing. The company also cited policy changes made by the social networking site that have hurt Zynga’s business. For example, in 2010, Facebook made the Facebook Credits payment system the primary way that players could pay for virtual goods needed to advance in Zynga’s games. As a result, Facebook took a larger cut of revenue. Facebook has also limited the level of communication its users may engage in about applications on the social network’s platform, a move that led to a decline in Zynga players, the filing said.

At a July 6 event launching a partnership with Skype, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the last five years in social networking were about connecting people. The next five years will be about building applications on “social infrastructure.” He added that the company with the best infrastructure to enable connected applications will win.

If Zuckerberg’s theory is correct, Zynga will be the first of many companies built on Facebook’s underpinnings.

Would You Cut This Deal?

How the Zynga story turns out largely depends on timing, according to experts at Wharton. Today, Zynga has access to Facebook’s 750 million users. Facebook needs Zynga to keep those users active on its network. “It would make no sense for Zynga to try to recreate Facebook’s social graph,” Werbach notes. “At the same time, Zynga’s success has been a huge boon to Facebook, both directly and indirectly. The two companies need each other.”

Zynga’s motives are clear: Become the leading social gaming company. In a letter to potential shareholders on July 1, Zynga CEO and co-founder Mark Pincus said the company was founded on the belief that “play — like search, share and shop — would become one of the core activities on the Internet.” But Facebook has exclusive access to some of Zynga’s most popular games under a deal that runs through 2015. As a result, Zynga cannot diversify the distribution points of its strongest games.

“From a theoretical standpoint, a firm that is entirely dependent on another firm is in a temporary position, and will likely either be acquired by the other firm, or will diversify. There is just too much risk that the power asymmetry will be exploited by the dominant firm,” says Karl Ulrich , an operations and information management professor at Wharton.

Hosanagar adds that Zynga has some time to figure out which path it wants to take. “In the short term, Zynga is chasing top line growth and is getting that on Facebook. So this is unlikely to be an issue of concern for Zynga in the next couple of years.”

But Eric Clemons , a Wharton operations and information management professor, argues that Zynga needs Facebook more than the other way around. That puts Zynga in danger, he says. He likens the Zynga-Facebook relationship to the airline industry when carriers depended completely on Sabre, a central ticketing system developed in conjunction with American Airlines. On the surface, it appeared that each side needed the other. Ultimately, however, Sabre wielded its dominance by imposing hefty fees on select airlines. “By 1984, American Airlines was making more money on Delta flights than Delta,” notes Clemons, who has written about the topic extensively. “Partners discovered that there was nothing codependent about the relationship.”

In looking at partnerships in multiple industries, Clemons concludes that one party typically has the power, and truly codependent relationships in business are few and far between.

Despite the risks, most experts at Wharton say they would have taken the same deal that Zynga signed with Facebook. “The terms of the deal spell out the limits on its ability to go elsewhere,” Werbach says. “That deal has been hugely beneficial for both companies. Zynga is about to go public at a valuation that would have seemed insane two years ago, based on revenues and profits that have similarly exploded. It’s hard to argue with that.”

The Race to Diversify

The catch for Zynga is that the Facebook gravy train may not last forever, and the company will eventually need more distribution partners. “Zynga and Facebook will continue to exist in a relationship of cooperative competition,” according to Werbach. “Zynga can’t afford to put all its eggs in Facebook’s basket, but neither can it live without the enormous push that it gets from its Facebook relationship.”

Google, which recently launched a new social network called Google+ to compete with Facebook, would seem to be a natural diversification option for Zynga. However, Zynga would still be dependent on what Clemons calls parallel monopolies. “Suppose that in five years, the world is 50% Google and 50% Facebook,” Clemons says. “Zynga will still need both. Half of its revenues go away if it gets into a fight with either. Distribution does not diversify as easily as other resources.”

In 2010, Zynga cut a distribution deal with Yahoo to feature games, including poker, FishVille and Mafia Wars, on the search engine’s games channel. The company has not disclosed revenue generated from the Yahoo partnership. In its broadest global diversification move to date, Zynga on July 26 announced that it has partnered with Tencent, one of China’s top Internet service providers. The move could give Zynga a much broader reach and keep the company’s Facebook deal intact because the social network does not operate in China.

Under its deal with Tencent, Zynga will launch a game called Zynga City, which is a localized version of its game CityVille. Zynga City will launch in Chinese. The game will be built on Tencent’s platform and be introduced on the Internet provider’s various properties.

Another option for Zynga would be to begin distributing games through its own website, a move Hosanagar supports.”I think Zynga should plan on becoming a destination site,” he says.

The End Game

History is littered with companies that partnered with others in codependent deals; the results are mixed. For instance, companies such as FinancialForce, an on-demand financial software provider, have built their applications on the platform of enterprise cloud computing company Salesforce.com. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has also acquired firms that have integrated closely with his company.

In Japan, mobile application developers were completely reliant on cell phone carrier NTT DoCoMo, and did well because of the wireless company’s dominant position, Hosanagar notes. Meanwhile, wireless carriers like Virgin Mobile and Boost Mobile thrived in the U.S. by marketing prepaid services without investing in any infrastructure of their own. “These companies were focused on front-end branding, marketing and sales,” Hosanagar says. “Eventually, these companies got acquired [by Sprint].”

Ulrich agrees that an acquisition would be a logical end point for Zynga. “The Facebook-Zynga symbiosis is extreme,” Ulrich notes. “If the company’s entire future is based on Facebook, then Zynga would be likely to be acquired by Facebook.”

According to Wharton management professor Lawrence Hrebiniak , most strategic alliances — unless they result in an acquisition — fail over time. If Zynga is able to diversify, the company could continue as an independent game developer. But that outcome also has its challenges. “Zynga’s business model depends on developing cool games and new titles to replace older ones. How long can Zynga do that? By the time the Facebook deal expires, Zynga may not be viable.”

Based on Zynga’s IPO filing, the company is well aware of fierce competition in the gaming space. The firm cited Electronic Arts, Walt Disney, mobile game developers such as Rovio (which makes Angry Birds) and other companies as competitors. Zynga also noted that companies that do not make social games today may decide to enter the market in the future. These potential rivals include Amazon, Google, Yahoo and, ironically, Facebook.

Zynga faces multiple potential outcomes, Werbach notes. It could separate from Facebook and grow into a powerhouse on its own, sell out or become the benchmark of an emerging trend — a company that remains successful and viable despite being dependent on someone else’s infrastructure and audience. At the same time, Facebook could cement its status as a dominant platform for other emerging companies.

“Facebook has been laying the groundwork for its platform strategy for years. It requires both significant technology investments in both infrastructure and software, as well as a business model that provides value for both sides of the equation,” says Werbach. “Once Internet companies get to a certain scale, the platform model provides the best opportunity for continued growth. Google, Apple, Facebook and eBay have all redesigned their businesses as platforms.”

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August 18, 2023 · 8 min read

Adapting to the changing games market: a Zynga spotlight

Sarah impey.

Content Creator at GameAnalytics

Every company will experience a slump at some point in their history. Platforms change. Demographics shift. The world moves forward. The trick is to find your footing and adapt to the changes.

Zynga is no different. They’ve had their ups and downs, but they’ve found a way to jump the hurdles set out in front of them. They learnt their lessons and changed up their model. It’s a journey that many studios might find themselves on, so we thought we’d dive into what they did and how they came out the other side as one of the most successful mobile gaming companies in the world.

Zynga’s story started well

In 2007, Mark Pincus founded Zynga. They launched their first game on Facebook: Zynga Poker. It was a huge success that set the stage for Zynga. The funding flowed in, they developed more titles on Facebook, like FarmVille, Mafia Wars and Cafe World, and they became one of the fastest-growing internet companies ever. A viral hit.

As it was well over a decade ago, you might not be familiar with the fervour that surrounded Zynga games. So let’s put it in perspective. CityVille managed to hit 26 million daily users in just 12 days. Five of their games were making $1 million a day. And, at their peak, they had 300 million monthly active users.

They were a big deal. And this was before they even went public.

Then the trouble began

In 2012, Facebook changed how their navigation worked. They began prioritising newer apps, and older games slipped down the list into obscurity. Over the next couple of years, Zynga lost nearly half its quarterly revenue – dropping from $322 million a quarter to $153 million in 2014 .

This was, of course, rather a shock. They stayed like this for around four years as they began to acquire a few studios and switch from making Facebook to mobile games.

The skyrocket back to the top

In 2015, Zynga hired Frank Gibeau as their CEO. It took a few years to get the ball rolling, but over time they shifted their business over to mobile development. Then, in 2021, they’d smashed $720 million a quarter.

Speaking with The Big Interview in 2019 , Gibeau explained the struggle they’d had. They’d acquired companies, but had the wrong incentive schemes for hitting targets. They’d not structured these studios very well.

“Investors didn’t trust us with their money,” Gibeau said. “It seemed like kind of a mess … a lot of clean-up-in-aisle-three kind of stuff.”

But with Gibeau’s interventions, they were back on top with games like Empires & Puzzles, Toy Blast and FarmVille 3 in their portfolio. But how did they get there? What had spurred their resurgence?

How did they do it?

A huge key to their success was through their acquisitions. They’d bought many creative and productive studios. Clearly, sorting out their structure went a long way towards their success.

But we’ve seen that there are essentially four elements that have helped their resurgence.

1. Acquisitions: Get in good talent

Over the next few years, Zynga acquired six notable studios. With these acquisitions, they were able to add games like Merge Dragons!, Golf Rival and Toon Blast to their portfolio. But they didn’t just focus on studios, they also bought companies like Chartboost, a monetization platform.

“We’re going to continue to be on offence [looking for] great companies, great cultures, great teams that we can bring into Zynga,” Gibeau told TechCrunch in 2021 . “When we started, nobody was picking up our phone calls. Now, when we call, we are a bit of a destination of choice for a lot of developers out there.”

Getting in the right talent and finding those hits has gone a long way to helping their success. And those acquisitions came at exactly the right time. The changes to Apple’s privacy policies could have really hurt Zynga, but because they were bringing all these studios together, they could share data across their portfolio. The changes were actually a good opportunity for them.

It’s a lesson even smaller studios can learn from. The more you can combine resources and join forces with other studios, the more you can both benefit.

2. Partnerships: Developing popular IPs

There are plenty of games that Zynga produces that are their own IP. But they don’t shy away from teaming up with popular brands, either. They have titles like Harry Potter: Puzzles & Spells, Wizard of Oz Magic Match, and Game of Throne Slots Casino.

From a design perspective, these games are all varied and conquer territory that the original IP could never have entered on their own. Harry Potter: Puzzles & Spells earnt around $135 million by 2021 .

“We’re combining some big licences with existing franchises that will grow the company,” Gibeau said, according to PocketGamer in 2018. “They will be familiar, but with new ways to play. They’re mobile from the ground up and will mix proven, better and new features.”

This is clearly a key part of their strategy, on top of acquisitions. And it’s advice that all studios should look to follow. Even if the loyalties do affect your margins.

“Licences are really efficient at enabling you to build a global audience quickly, and they also have great staying power,” Gibeau added. “Yes, there might be some pushback on gross margins, but they also lower your risk.”

3. Social elements: Let people play together

When you look through the list of games Zynga owns, it’s clear that social is still at its core. Not surprising, considering they started by making Facebook games. But you can still see that trend in titles like Words with Friends 2, Bluff Plus, and Tiny Royale.

Zynga’s general manager in Turkey, Buğra Koç, spoke to PocketGamer about Bluff Plus specifically . And it was clear that social was a core part of the experience for them.

“One of the game’s biggest features is its enriched, online social experience that was crucial to enhancing multiplayer gameplay,” he said. “It was very important for us to implement strong social mechanics to the game as well as smooth and fun gameplay.”

It’s a similar story with almost all their games. And it isn’t just in the core mechanics; they are constantly adding other ways to make their games more social. For example, they’ve added guild-like clubs into games like Words with Friends 2 and Harry Potter: Puzzles & Spells. They even released ReVamp, the first multiplayer social deception game for Snapchat.

4. Updates: Keep the content regular

The large part of Zynga’s revenue comes from in-app purchases and currency. Not unusual for a mobile game publisher, but that means that they need to keep releasing content for their games.

They focus a lot on keeping a game alive, rather than simply moving on to the next project. They call these ‘forever franchises’ – and they’re key for the company.

But how do you keep those franchises alive forever? Content. That’s why they’ve done in-game events that tie into movie releases or are linked to social movements like Pride Month. The latest of these is a partnership with Lucasfilm Games to release new characters and maps for Star Wars: Hunters , which is coming to the Switch and mobile later this year.

Another way they keep releasing new content and games is to run regular hackathons . These encourage developers to come up with new ideas and prototypes in as little as four days. Often, those ideas can end up being incorporated into their other titles or could get spun out into their own games.

Bring it all together

Looking at Zynga’s success, it’s clear that we can all learn from them. When the going was tough, they stuck it out and adapted their model. They focus on bringing in the best developers, teaming up with popular brands, making sure their games are as social as possible, and regularly releasing content.

These are all tips and tricks that any studio should look to replicate. Perhaps not on the scale of Zynga. But partnerships, social mechanics, and content are all areas that are achievable – even small scale.

Keep up to date with the latest news

If you find our musings and deconstructions of games useful, make sure that you never miss out. You can follow us on Twitter , Facebook and LinkedIn – or sign up for our newsletter to make sure that you’re always in the loop.

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Zynga and the Launch of Farmville

In June 2009, the online gaming company Zynga launched the free social game Farmville on Facebook, which set a new record by reaching one million Daily Active Users four days after launch, skyrocketing to 30 million in six months. The case takes an inside look at how Zynga created FarmVille in just six weeks, including the important strategic and technical decisions Zynga made, the sometimes tense team dynamics, and the challenges Zynga’s founder and CEO Mark Pincus faced within Zynga. The company’s experienced game developers had strongly resisted his idea to develop a farm game because farm games performed poorly on traditional game consoles and were considered an inferior gaming category. But Pincus believed they afforded access to new audiences and wanted to seize the strategic opportunity offered by the convergence of advances in technology and the meteoric rise of Facebook. These combined well with Zynga’s advanced data analytics capabilities, which allowed the company to aggressively advance a new business model “Games as a Service,” in which developers continuously added features to make a social game consistently compelling.

Post launch, FarmVille was continually evolving and adding new features. But after a few months, the quality of the code and the ideas for new features were getting worse, more bugs and quality assurance problems arose, and users were complaining that new features were late and the game was getting rote. This case is set in late December 2009 as user numbers started to drop, and Pincus and the FarmVille team tried to figure out how to turn this trend around. Zynga’s leadership team had to figure out how to reinvigorate FarmVille so that it would continue to be the goose that laid the golden eggs.

The case also details the video game industry’s recent history, trends and technology advances. It covers video game development and introduces concepts such as game mechanics and core loops, which are applicable to other gamification contexts.

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How Zynga executed its stunning turnaround

Until very recently, Zynga was synonymous with stagnation — an ossified fossil, cemented inertly in place and viewed as a relic of a bygone era. The story of Zynga’s initial ascent — how it manufactured growth for its Facebook canvas games through viral messaging — is well known and cited frequently as a case study against dependency on an external platforms : Zynga’s stock debuted at near $10 per share when it IPOd in 2011, rose to more than $14 per share (giving the company a market capitalization of nearly $15BN), and subsequently plunged into the $2 range in 2012, where it remained through the middle of 2017.

Zynga experienced so much structural change during that roughly five year period that it’s easy for any historical assessment of the company to get mired in the details: its acquisition of NaturalMotion , executive turnover , failed launches like Dawn of Titans and Empires & Allies , etc. But those developments are largely irrelevant now: the current incarnation of Zynga, led by former EA executive Frank Gibeau, has executed against an incredible corporate turnaround strategy that should serve as a blueprint for reviving a moribund company in a dynamic, extraordinarily competitive industry. Since Gibeau joined the company in early 2016, Zynga’s stock price has more than tripled, with mobile bookings growing to 96% of total bookings of $387MM in Q4 2019, compared to $139MM in Q1 2016 (the first earnings report at which Frank Gibeau presided).

How did Zynga manage to execute such a successful turnaround? Its general strategy seems to rely on three central tenets:

• Acquire top-line revenue growth by paying premia for proven titles with ample upside : With Gram Games (Merge Dragons!) and Small Giant Games (Empires and Puzzles), Zynga acquired proven properties with upward momentum at premia and funded their user acquisition to deliver immense top-line revenue growth;
• Devolve publishing power to satellite studios: rather than centralizing critical operational functions like user acquisition and live operations, Zynga’s acquired studios manage these capabilities themselves, with minimal distance from the game teams;
• Focus existing publishing capabilities on growing forever franchises and its social casino business: Zynga has consolidated its first-party development into its existing live portfolio and the social casino category, fully exploiting its institutional knowledge and avoiding costly, distracting experimentation outside of the areas in which it has demonstrable competitive advantage.

Much attention has been paid to the fact that Zynga has retrenched around its forever franchises , but the broader context around that decision is important:

• Large organizations are worse at innovating than smaller, more nimble start-ups;
• Mobile gaming is a hits-driven industry;
• Growth through performance user acquisition increasingly relies on deep knowledge of a game’s economy ;
• “Platform technology” has mostly been commodified and can’t deliver many operational efficiencies to satellite / acquired studios;
• Hit games on growth trajectories tend to remain on those growth trajectories: when cash is not a constraint, it’s a better strategy to pay a premium for a proven hit game than to buy an unproven game at a discount.

Zynga has oriented its corporate strategy around these five themes to deliver incredible results during its turnaround phase but especially over the past two years, as Gram Games’ Merge Dragons! and Small Giant Games’ Empires & Puzzles have driven consistent Top Grossing results, with Zynga and its satellite studios layering new successful titles into the portfolio and optimizing legacy titles. Zynga now has an incredibly impressive mobile portfolio: consider the Top Grossing charts for Zynga titles for the last 90 days, filtering out all titles without a Top 500 position as of mid-April.

Zynga’s strategy bucks conventional wisdom around growing revenues for a mobile gaming studio, which generally prescribes 1) centralizing shared services (such as UA, analytics, live ops, etc.) into a single infrastructure onto which acquired games can be integrated, 2) building value through M&A by acquiring companies cheaply and unlocking efficiencies through the application of the aforementioned technologies and services (eg. finding a game studio that is underperforming because its user acquisition team and tools are inferior), and 3) expanding first party game production across as many genres as possible. Zynga has reversed its fortunes over the past few years by doing the opposite of each of these things.

Two mistakes that seemingly every major mobile gaming studio has made at some point are believing that 1) all game genres are created equal, and that success in one genre predicts success in another, and 2) their centralized tools and platforms are much more valuable than they actually are and can unlock tremendous value when games from acquired developers are integrated into them.

Diversifying a gaming portfolio is very difficult to do without without any sort of external influence: the amount of genre-specific institutional knowledge required to build and operate a hit game is immense. Companies like Zynga and Playtika are proving that the best way to diversify a portfolio outside of a core competency is through M&A — and to pay a premium for exceptional companies that have already proven traction. This is what Zynga has done over the past few years, and the results are irrefutably astounding.

Disclaimer: I hold Zynga stock

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(Case Study) Zynga On Game Development Tools

As part of our participation in the Game Developer Conference 2010 in San Francisco, we reached out to nearly 600 of our game development customers to see who might be interested in participating in an interview. We were pleased to learn that Zynga was a user of Atlassian tools. We were even more pleased to learn they’d be willing to do a case study with us, and that they are located within walking distance from our San Francisco office!

Founded in 2007, Zynga is one of the most successful game development companies on the social gaming scene. Having raised $180 million in December 2009 , Zynga has clearly developed an innovative business model that is capturing the attention of serious investors and venture capitalists. Today you will find their immensely popular games on Facebook, MySpace and the iPhone. According to the Inside Facebook blog, in February 2010, Zygna made six of Facebook’s ten most popular games including FarmVille, Cafe World, Texas Holdem Poker, Mafia Wars, FishVille and Petville. Collectively, these six games had over 209,490,021 active players!

Micah Figone, QA Manager at Zynga, was kind enough to sit with us for an hour to discuss their use of Atlassian’s bug tracking , agile project management , perforce integration , and peer code review tools. We also chatted about game development in general. Micah expressed how “in some form or another, whether they realize it or not, everybody” at Zynga uses Atlassian tools to make their widely popular games.

The Interview

So who are you and where are we.

My name is Micah Figone and I am the QA Manager at Zynga in San Francisco. It seems like an eternity, but I have been at Zynga a year and six months. My department is the QA for the whole company. My team varies in functions from automation to their normal black box testers to security testers.

What programming languages do you develop in?

You have games like Mafia Wars and Vampire, and that’s all PHP based. Then you have the games like FarmVille, Cafe, YoVille, Poker, all Flash. Those are really the only two spaces we live in: PHP and Flash.

What games are developed using Atlassian tools?

All of them. Every game you can play has some interaction with Atlassian tools.

Atlassian Tools

What atlassian tools do you currently use and how did they make their way into zynga.

Currently we are using Jira, with GreenHopper of course, Fisheye, and we’re planning on using Crucible shortly. A web based code review tool is great, so you don’t have to say ‘hey, let me pull up a chair next to your desk.’ Everybody can review, you don’t have to have 20 people crowding around your desk. That’s something I definitely want to do. We are also evaluating Confluence.

We were using another bug database when I started a year and a half ago. Immediately I migrated everybody to Jira. As far as the other products go, they lived here already. They weren’t heavily used, but through integrating to Jira and Fisheye, surfacing the information and saying ‘hey developers, look, you can see your commits – just put the issue number in, and it auto-links.’

So you are THE Jira evangelist?

Yes! I’ve used it before in other companies and I’ve used other products as well, but Jira to me is the easiest, most user-friendly, intuitive interface that you have. We are looking forward to upgrading to Jira 4.0 and using the boolean searches. Advanced searching is important. Every dev team has their own project. Some dev teams have multiple projects.

How many people, would you guess, are using our products across the company?

In some form or another, whether they realize or not, everybody. Everybody here, whether it be an IT request, a new hire, a facility request from our shared services organization to our net-ops team to QA, and the development teams themselves.

Can you comment on the use of GreenHopper?

Some use GreenHopper more than others. Some use it for task management. GreenHopper is great because it provides an intuitive interface that you would do by just clicking. It’s like ‘drag, drag, drag,’ it’s a LOT faster.

How are Atlassian products used in Pre-production & Production?

It is all done in house. The pre-production games live outside of the tools for sure. As they become more complete, we take an excel sheet and import them into Jira. After that, everybody uses Jira. Pre-production is kind of a fun case because, here, it’s very short.

Do all teams iterate at the same cadence?

It’s all over the board. We push out a new feature to a certain set of users, and iterate on that feature as we go.

Can you comment on Time Tracking?

It’s something that I’m trying to get people to use, because it can be used for a slew of things. It’s just showing the development teams how it helps. But, because we move so fast, it’s kind of irrelevant. Some games teams have tried it, some stick with it, some it slows them down. I love burn down charts and like to say ‘here is your projection,’ but that only works with some of the larger milestones. It’s good for a larger feature that is more involved. Project planning on that level is very important.

Are people using the products in ways you hadn’t expected?

It’s not ways that I wouldn’t expect, it’s the customizations that gets me sometimes. Sometimes I ask, ‘why would you want to do that?’. Being QA, I like everything central. Sometimes people want different workflows and to close bugs differently. I’ll say ‘OK, here you go,’

Did you customize the products in any way? (screens/fields/workflow)

We have all the games using the same screens. If you look at my field configuration screen, I couldn’t tell you how many there are. Some teams want different fields on different tasks. Same goes for workflows – different workflows for different issue types for a feature, you’re going to want a different set of fields.

What would you tell another game dev shop if they were considering using Atlassian tools?

That they should! I think that other products, when you end up learning them, can be pretty powerful. Jira is great, however, because 1) it doesn’t take you long to learn it, 2) it provides the same amount of power the others do, but without the learning curve, and 3) if I want to search, it’s easy. The ability to do fuzzy search and relative search and also do boolean, you don’t need to worry about learning too much.

Game Development

What software development methodologies does your team use (scrum, xp, waterfall).

We take pieces of agile for the most part. It’s definitely a hybrid; I don’t think anyone can use agile as it’s quoted in a book. You take pieces that work for your team. But among the teams themselves, they all, for the most part, have their own flavors of agile. Some use more of it, some use less of it. There are various teams that use GreenHopper, and some that don’t.

What are the strengths and weaknesses of that approach?

My comment is on the weaknesses; I don’t know if there is any weaknesses with taking what you need out of agile. There’s a lot of strengths with the fact that it is completely good for people that are really rapid in the development, and it provides a lot of strength in your flexibility. You are able to react. If you are using waterfall, you have to plan out so far ahead, and what if something changes? You’ve got to change everything including design docs and all that jazz. Being QA, I’m definitely a believer in design docs but sometimes you got to move really fast and just update them later. So the main strengths I see are definitely flexibility.

In your opinion, how important are software development tools to game development?

Extremely, I’m a big propoent of tools that make people’s lives easier. Through those tools you really surface information, automate reports, and provide dashboards for people to look at and see their stats on the fly whenever they want. Put them up on a big screen TV and let them watch on auto-refresh, let them watch their stats as they go so they can see how they are doing.

How is software development changing within the gaming industry?

Zynga is on the forefront of this. Normally, game development cycles take months to release a new patch. We take an approach to make changes to what users are saying and adapting to what they are saying; testing things in the real world and getting their feedback. That’s where I see the game development going for sure.

Can you comment on driving of innovation in the game dev space?

I think the social networking gaming space is a new industry so to speak. We operate by a different set of rules. I think it is only a matter of time before the larger gaming studios realize the power of those rules. Before I worked here, I came from the MMO space. I’m used to long dev cycles. When I first came here I was like ‘you push how fast, is that even sustainable?’ It totally is, but it is so powerful. It provides a hands on interaction with users that others can do. You can’t do rapid development on an MMO. Users now-a-days always want more and want to be heard. There are things we can easily tweak. When we test new features, not everyone makes it.

Is the culture here different to traditional game companies, especially with regard to release dates?

I think there is less of a stress around release dates, and more around what features are released. If there is a high priority item, there is definitely that ‘oh my god, we gotta do this now.’ When you have a release date 2 weeks away, you get stressed for those 2 weeks.

A big shout out to Zygna’s Micah Figone (QA) and Lisa Chan (PR) for all their help!

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Zynga Case Study

How questionpro provided conjoint analysis and survey software solutions for online gaming company zynga, 350+ free survey templates, customer surveys, human resources surveys, marketing surveys, industry surveys, community surveys, academic evaluation surveys, non-profit surveys, online gaming survey solutions at zynga - questionpro case study, zynga company profile.

Zynga Inc. is the world’s largest social game developer with more than 290 million monthly active users playing their games, which include leading Facebook games FarmVille, CityVille, FrontierVille, Zynga Poker and Mafia Wars, among others. Zynga games are available on a number of platforms aside from Facebook including MySpace, Yahoo, Android, iPad and iPhone.

Zynga Business Challenges

In order to best serve their dedicated gaming audience, Zynga needed to connect with their users in a meaningful, non-interruptive way to gather feedback on how to further improve Zynga games. No easy task, considering that many Zynga users only have a few minutes per day to spare on games. Although Zynga makes a point of using usage data in their design and decision-making, they needed to build on their rich usage data to understand how their players think and feel.

Zynga Business Solutions

The Zynga user research department worked with QuestionPro to build a survey solution that fit their unique needs. Surveys were created by the Zynga team and deployed by QuestionPro, tasks included:

• Questions that could be randomly distributed across a broad set of players.
• Launched surveys within the Zynga game experience.
• A typical survey took less than two minutes for respondents to complete.
• Sampled a breadth of perspectives from thousands of Zynga players without disrupting their game experience.
• Utilized Conjoint Analysis to minimize the number of questions that players need to answer, but clearly understand players’ needs.

After launching the surveys, Zynga received thousands of responses and a wealth of actionable, real-time information to benefit their users. As a result of that information, Zynga was able to make informed decisions, including:

• Prioritized and rapidly pursued improvements and new feature additions to address player needs.
• Planned possible new games to add to their catalog of game titles.

Zynga Gaming Feedback

Gaming is becoming an ever more important part of the digital ecosystem. However, in an increasingly flooded marketplace, research companies are suggesting that the key to being successful in the gaming industry is building good games based on the feedback of all players. However, collecting user feedback from gamers without disrupting the gaming experience requires simplicity and accessibility.

QuestionPro leading software ensures not only an accessible and streamlined experience for the survey taker, but also for the survey creator. This allows companies to collect meaningful feedback while also ensuring an efficient survey experience for the user.

“The QuestionPro team is committed to innovation and easy-to-use collaborative tools,” said Kevin Keeker, Senior User Researcher at Zynga. “QuestionPro allows users to pursue complex sets of data through randomization, dynamic questions presentment, counterbalancing, and much more. We’ve worked with them on a number of projects so far and we’re looking forward to a long-lasting partnership that helps us fulfill our ongoing need for richer and more dynamic user information.”

Zynga Business Outcome

Zynga was successful in gathering customer feedback solutions from its customers without any interruption in the gaming experience.

To learn more about Zynga games and their other initiatives, visit www.zynga.com.

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