IEEE Spectrum June, 2011 - 72

A Special Report

in San Francisco, is now bigger than
Electronic Arts, the industry mainstay
famous for the chart-topping Madden
football and Sim City franchises. The
communal aspect is central to Zynga's
strategy. As Dorion Carroll, chief of
technology of the shared technology
group for Zynga, says, "We're not a
gaming company. We're a social gaming company."
Games are profoundly shaping
the future of the Web and, as a result,
the strategies of the two biggest players online: Facebook and Google. The
annual Game Developers Conference
is the usual place where people take
the pulse of the industry. And at this
year's conference, the two companies
loomed large. The panels on Facebook
games and Google's two-day-long
developer summit were both jammed.
The companies' interest in games
ref lects their differing visions: the
openness and decentralization of
Google versus the walled-but--thriving
community of Facebook. "Games for
Facebook are a mechanism to drive
you to the page and keep you there,"
says Michael Pachter, an analyst with
Wedbush, a Los Angeles-based financial services firm. "Games for Google
are to drive you to their [Android operating system] and keep you there. It's
different strategies and outcomes."

S O C I A L GA M E S A R E N ' T N E W. B E F O R E

computers, games were inherently
social, because essentially all of them
were meant to be played by two or
more people. The new social games,
however, have a fundamentally different purpose. Socialization isn't meant
to enhance the games; the games
are meant to enhance socialization.
They've been designed to do that for
a very specific and simple reason: The
more people who hang out online, the
more Facebook and Google can cash in.
By attracting specific demographics
of players and uncovering information
about their habits, preferences, and
acquaintances, social games are tailor72

NA * IEEE SPECTRUM * JUNE 2011

made for supporting targeted advertising. Moreover, players can enhance
their experience by purchasing digital
items with credits, for which they pay
real cash in the real world. If you think
no one but a misfit would spend hardearned money on a virtual crop duster,
you're wrong: Zynga alone is pulling
in $1 billion that way, according to estimates by Wedbush. And by taking a
30 percent cut of all credit purchases
made through all its games, Facebook
earns roughly $500 million a year.
To reach a wide market, the more
accessible such games are, the better. FarmVille isn't Grand Theft Auto or

If you think no one but
a misfit would spend
hard-earned money on
a virtual crop duster,
you're wrong:
ZYNGA ALONE IS PULLING
IN $1 BILLION THAT WAY

Halo or some other blockbuster that
demands dozens of hours of play and
thumbs that dance like Lady Gaga
to achieve competence. The object of
FarmVille couldn't be more straight-
forward: You run a farm with the help
of your online friends. It's a light diversion, something you enjoy in installments. The simplicity lends itself well to
smartphones, allowing games to fill tiny
gaps of downtime throughout the day.
A s F a c e b o o k 's m e m b e r s h i p
exploded in 2008 and 2009, so did its
games. Led by FarmVille, Zynga grew
from 16.9 million monthly active users
in September 2008 to 200 million in
November 2009, according to Inside
Social Games. And the surge isn't limited to Zynga. In April 2010, PopCap
Games, the Seattle-based creators of
the hit puzzler Bejeweled, launched a
Facebook version called Bejeweled Blitz
that quickly racked up 3.8 million daily
players. PopCap attributes the success,
in part, to Facebook's use of real identi-

ties for members; that appeals to casual
gamers and sets Facebook apart from
the faceless free-for-all of other online
games. "People are far more comfortable playing with people they really
know," says Jon David, vice president
of social games for PopCap.
With games now attracting so many
eyeballs and dollars, Facebook is ramping up its strategy in the market. Last
November, the company hired a dedicated director of engineering for game
platforms: Cory Ondrejka. The -cocreator
of Linden Labs' pioneering virtual
world Second Life and Linden's former
chief technology officer, Ondrejka says
games are central to the mission of the
site. "Games on Facebook are inherently
social," he notes. "The whole point of
putting a game on Facebook is that you
can play with friends."
Engineering a Facebook game has
its appeal: It can cost as little as $100 000
to develop, which is peanuts compared
to the tens or even hundreds of millions that go into a sophisticated console
game. But so many game developers
rose early to the challenge that Facebook
users were quickly overwhelmed, as
developers essentially spammed users
through news feeds and wall posts.
In March 2010, Facebook finally put
restrictions on such viral promotions.
Users welcomed that reform, but for
developers, it made publicizing their
new games harder.
For those lucky developers who do
manage to get the word out, Facebook
success can pose its own headaches.
With FarmVille, Zynga had to quickly
scale up a game from zero users to more
than a million in just days, while simultaneously readying the game to add still
more millions as word spread. Prior to
FarmVille, the company ran its games on
racks of computer servers in designated
data centers. As the game exploded in
popularity, however, Zynga engineers
had to change their approach.
"We simply could not have acquired
and configured hardware fast enough
to meet the user demand," Carroll
Continued on page 84
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum June, 2011