BETA | INSIDE ZYNGA
ZYNGA, THE CONSOLE OF THE 21st CENTURY Why former Xbox and EA man John Schappert is right at home as one of Zynga’s top dogs
ONCE UPON A TIME John Schappert was Mr Console. He co-founded Tiburon, the studio that would go
on to build the hugely successful Madden games. He was subsequently one of the most committed
EA execs, eventually looking after worldwide publishing, its online platform group and EA Interactive amongst others. He even worked a tenure at Xbox as head of its
Live online games division. But last year he was Zynga’s biggest catch; the
console pro poached to the world of free browser and mobile games, becoming COO of the most watched new firm in games. These days, he tells Develop, “you don’t need
anything” to be a gamer or in the games business. The traditional part of the business “has always been limited by, ‘gotta buy the hardware’, ‘gotta buy the software’, ‘gotta go to retail’… there’s all of these barriers that the industry has been living in before.” And as for the actual audience: “Every device you
have is a gaming device and everyone is a gamer. And when you do that… a quarter of a billion people a month play your game.”
NEW INDUSTRY, NEW ROLES TO PLAY What tempted him to make the jump to Zynga? “It’s where I saw gaming going. When I was at
Electronic Arts I worked very closely with the group that had casual, mobile and social, and you just saw the explosive growth that was happening in that. It’s going from a couple of hundred million gamers to everyone being a gamer, billions of people. “I’ve been in the industry my entire career. I love
games, but I look at my own habits: I have fewer and fewer times where I could dedicate 40 hours to a longer play time experience. But I find myself dedicating ten, 15 minutes here and there to these short-burst experiences.” It’s this personal thinking that in-part seems to
inform his overall view on the business. He says pain lies ahead for the parts of the traditional games business that is trying to ignore or write off the social games boom. “People have to change. You have to think about things differently. “You can’t think about $60 games and an installed base of a console. “You’ve got to think ‘where are all the gamers
today?’ They’re on that iPhone, they’re on Android devices, they’re on tablets, Macintosh, they’re on that PC, they are everywhere.” He adds, with old colleagues, former employers and existing friends on his mind no doubt: “And by the way, they are still on consoles too.”
One day we’d like to have a billion people
play on our platform. But we can’t do it all. So we can work with independent studios to bring their games to the masses.
PLATFORM GAMES Although responsible for all of Zynga’s day-to-day runnings, Schappert regularly points his conversation with Develop back to the firm’s new
Zynga.com publishing platform for third-parties. Cynics may snort, but the confidence of this
move is reassuring. Schappert pitches it as it is both an antidote to the things social games were once criticised for (and which Zynga exploited) and an answer to the problems they currently face (which Zynga arguably exacerbated). It takes the pressure off of spamming a feed or
nagging real world friends for virtual items or help via Facebook, instead asking players to run dedicated friends lists and play at Zynga’s owned site. And it provides a way for smaller studios to cut through the noise of social games by piggy-backing
off of Zynga’s scale and strength as a source for social games. “You don’t have to invite other players to your
Facebook friend list so that they see what you did on the weekend or what your baby photos look like and other things you probably don’t want to share with the world, but you can still play games with them,” says Schappert. “When we have people play together, they play
longer. They enjoy their game more and they continue to come back more often. They stay engaged longer and they retain longer. It’s a better experience for everyone. The more we can connect people together and the more social we can make that game, the more of a win we get which is really why we’ve done
Zynga.com.” A number of third-party firms finding their way in social and not wanting to be left behind have signed up to put games on the service – from Konami to the UK’s own Rebellion. “What we’ve realised is unlike the past space about becoming a publisher, right now the great thing is you don’t need to buy new hardware, you don’t need to have a disc distribution centre and anyone can make a game. But the irony is that there are more games out there than there are people to play them.”
A BILLION PLAYERS Zynga, he says, genuinely wants to help others cut through. It won’t help all of them, of course – and it’s here that you realise exactly why a former EA and Microsoft exec was targeted to help run Zynga – but it does genuinely want to offer something back to select partners at least. “One day we’d like to have a billion people play on our platform,” he says. Zynga is currently at 240m a month. That’s just 25 per cent of the way to the target. “We’d like to get a billion people to play, but we realise we can’t do it all. We don’t have to develop them all but we can work with independent developers to take their games and bring them out to the masses.”
ZYNGA WITH FRIENDS Texas. Formed in 2008 as Newtoy, and creator of Chess With Friends and Words With Friends for iOS and eventually other mobile platforms. Acquired for $53m and renamed by Zynga in November 2010. Released Hanging With Friends in summer 2011 and Scramble With Friends in January.
20 | MAY 2012
ZYNGA GERMANY Frankfurt. Zynga bought German game engine firm Dextrose in September 2010 to give it an edge in developing web games, specifically around HTML5.
ZYNGA AUSTIN Texas. The renamed Challenge Games, known for online card games, bought in summer 2010 for $20m. In April 2011 Zynga bought MarketZero, responsible for a site that tracked career stats of online poker players, in order to hire its staff. Last year the team unveiled HTML5 game Zynga Poker Mobile Web.
ZYNGA NEW YORK Founded in 2005 as Area/Code and dedicated to building ‘big games’ which ‘spill out over the edges of our screens’. Best known for addictive mobile game Drop7, released in 2009. Bought by Zynga in January 2011. Later that year Zynga also acquired AstroApe Studios, adding that team to its New York complement.
DEVELOP-ONLINE.NET
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