The latest issue that has come up concerning Zynga's shady business practices centers around how their game, Dream Heights, is almost a direct clone of Tiny Tower. Here is what he had to say about that.
Tiny Tower + D Heights is all standard operating procedure here. If you can't buy em, clone em. Even the core technology for FarmVille (MyMiniLife), was bought. The only "homegrown" codebases at Zynga is MafiaWars2 and maybe Poker, the rest of their tech was just bought from small studios. Lookup Dextrose Engine. To me, that's utterly creepy. They try to choke out the competition by gating all these engines and tech.
He also revealed how Zynga will spy on players and resort to completely fudging gameplay statistics to turn a profit.
Spying on players. Getting intimate gaming data, their habits, their networks, and how to effectively monetize given X. Another issue was skewing gameplay for the sake of profit, example; I actually resorted to BAD MATH, to make the case for making a feature more fun. At the end of one sprint, a QA dude was complaining about the drop rate of a specific item being absurdly insane, and therefore UnFun. I looked at the code, and tweaked some values, gave it back to QA guy, and fun was restored. Product Manager overrides this, goes for unfun, yet more profitable version.
Ok. Here's another example;
Internal metrics researchers often give studio wide talks on what trends are going on. They've basically tracked down very popular players and also players who've spent an excess of 10k into the game.
We often tweak our features to match and maximize for a particular gaming habit. We do this for massive populations of players.
Players are not aware of this. To me, that's a big brother like issue, someone is measuring and monitoring your behavior intimately, and you don't know how that data is going to be used.
Ok. Here's another example;
Internal metrics researchers often give studio wide talks on what trends are going on. They've basically tracked down very popular players and also players who've spent an excess of 10k into the game.
We often tweak our features to match and maximize for a particular gaming habit. We do this for massive populations of players.
Players are not aware of this. To me, that's a big brother like issue, someone is measuring and monitoring your behavior intimately, and you don't know how that data is going to be used.
Yes, there are players who have actually spent over $10,000 on Zynga games.
The list of crap from Zynga continues from how horribly they treat contract workers (direct quote, "Z treats em like shit"), how Zynga can access just about any piece of information they want to thanks to their deeply rooted ties with Facebook, and more. The entire thread is a very engaging read and quite enlightening to just how little Zynga actually cares about anything but turning an illegitimate profit.
Elaborating a bit more on contract workers, Zynga does not treat them like employees in any sense. The company makes a point of not welcoming them to any company events and are actually excluded from them. They are also expected to work twice as hard as full time, regular employees. And yet, Zynga remains one of the most profitable "developers" on Facebook.
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