I spent a few years at Zynga. A few clicks and keypresses on LinkedIn will confirm this to be true. One element I loved about working at Zynga is that it was a great gateway career to working in games. Some companies have a self-absorbed AAA stink that makes it hard to get a job there. I used to joke with people, “You need five years of EA experience to work at Activision. You also need five years of Activision experience to work at EA.” Especially at the more senior levels. There are only five remaining top ten publishers and they may as well have an expressway between their HR departments for the amount of revolving doors for their employees.
This article is not about the stagnation of creativity inside the publicly held quote-unquote game industry marketplace leaders. It could be on some other day.
I plan to tunnel a little on Zynga. When people want to work in games, they generally envision some grand magnum opus game project they hold deep inside their hearts. I have a few such games. I have some MMO games, some hunting games, some casual games, and some mid-core games. Most of these games will not see the light of day because there is not enough time in the day, and I do not have the kind of “eff you” money I would need to hire teams to build them all. I have pitched a few of these games and a few game portfolios to publishers over the years. One regret is that while I would drop a couple hundred bucks on some crude prototype art, I never quite convinced myself it would be worth a couple thousand bucks to make the prototype prettier. While I have a pretty good inner eye for the bones of a game, the mechanics, and the opportunity, this is a rare skill. Most people’s inner eye cannot come to the phone right now. I did try to leave a message after the beep.
There was nothing more infuriating than hearing a portfolio manager at a publishing company say, “I would personally play the shit out of this game, but we could never publish that here.” If I had made these games more beautiful, at least one or two of those would have gone to the greenlight committee. I understand that now.
This article is not about pitching games, either.
Or is it?
Some game company applicants to Zynga look at the variety of games they ship and think, “Golly! These folks are all over the place, and their portfolio has no rhyme or reason!”
These applicants will have a “big-brain” moment and conclude that they can get a job, spend some time in the trenches on an existing title, and after some time-in-role and maybe a little heroics, Zynga will allow them to build their One True Game.
It is not the worst idea in the world.
It also does not work that way.
One of the most amazing things I have seen at Zynga is the amount of anxiety that the company culture effectively creates in its staff through its superpowers. Setting aside a few early spectacular failures, the one thing that Zynga is good at is buying existing games.
I see your Spock eyebrows raising. I shall elaborate a little for you.
A significant number of Zynga’s titles were acquisitions. Some of the games were also logical extensions of other brands. One of the most amazing social phenomena inside the company was the number of people who attached themselves to the success of Farmville and would attempt to use that street cred to bully people. I have heard a dozen variants about who was responsible for what, and the stories differed enough between people that I could not determine what was true. Some people, through coffee meetings, lunches, and drinks, would argue that zero long-term successes were wholly created inside Zynga.
It was not for a lack of trying. There were a lot of additional stories being told about game projects that never made it to the consumer marketplace, as well as games that were launched only to be shelved for not hitting their numbers. For the games that launched, there was always a question about whether or not there were realistic targets attached to the game to achieve the “Zynga scale” to keep investing in it.
It was an interesting question that people constantly asked themselves and each other. Zynga was excellent at acquiring studios and giving them space to operate and thrive. The price of that excellence appears to be a struggle to create new franchises and games.
I will not debate what number of original games were created at Zynga. I will give kudos to the business development teams who spotted great companies to acquire to maintain significant growth and market presence over the years.
This observation is not a thinly veiled attempt at criticism for Zynga. It is intended to point out Zynga’s superpower. Zynga is reasonably good at franchise management. It is likely why Take-Two acquired them.
There are two things that I would take away from this.
The first is that it is important to know what your superpower is. I think that Zynga did not take advantage of this. There were constant efforts to build new games and launch them inside the business. In hindsight, I think these efforts were ill-informed. A better approach would be to provide strategic funding for a handful of folks to spin out into their own business and attempt to launch the game independently. Put some strings on the investment to give Zynga reasonable options to bring that back to the mothership. Do not make them onerous, but make them fair to everyone involved.
Second, you should take advantage of that superpower as a game creator. If you want to create new mobile games, go and work at Zynga for two to five years and establish that you can effectively contribute or manage live operations games at scale. When you have this mastery, use that to check off some investor boxes for de-risking your own studio. I did not do this early enough in my career to benefit from that experience.
I will close by stating that I am a contrarian. I think financially challenging times are the best time to start a business. If you can succeed in a low-oxygen environment, you can succeed anywhere. Learning to manage a successful franchise will help convince investors that you have unfair competitive advantages.
Thank you, as always, for reading along. To check the box on “Does this post have a magnificent ‘Must Purchase’ Amazon Affiliate link?” I would ask you to check out Razer’s BlackShark V2 wireless gaming headset. My kids have beaten the heck out of their SteelSeries headsets with an unacceptable MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures), and we are switching brands to see if these will be more durable.
I look forward to writing next week!
