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i’m old enough and i’m not against paying for games i enjoy either, but Zynga do to many nice things for cash only customers and screw the free ones. It would be better if they just made everything so it can be bought with either cash or fake currency….but not so it costs like 100000gold for something that costs 12cash like in cafe world, that **** sucks
http://technologiez.net/2010/07/25/zynga-the-go…

I remember reading your post. I would like to respond to something you said. I agree that DAUs are a better proxy for “active” users than MAU. So let's look at the DAU numbers as well. According to AppData, Zynga has around 62 million DAUs as of today. Assuming de-duping, we're looking at 25-30 million people, maybe a tad more than you suggested. But overall I agree with you that DAUs are a better proxy for engagement. But when you're thinking about the overall market opportunity, I'd argue that reach is a leading indicator of engagement – if you've reached nearly 50% of the audience and about 20% of the audience you've reached becomes truly engaged (124 million monthlies / 25 million dailies), I see no reason to believe that those you have not reached are more likely to engage. So you and I are just arguing over the right way to think about sizing the real opportunity and what should be measured when thinking about growth.

I also agree with you that social games developers have pushed the boundaries in terms of using the distribution channels that Facebook has made available – that's why a lot of those channels have been taken away. No social app developers I know haven't argued that that big draw of Facebook is a huge market + low-cost (or even free) distribution.

We live in exciting times. I really enjoy reading the Gamasutra take on social games – you guys come at it from a different angle and that's key to keeping everyone honest and helping move the debate forward. Keep up the good work!

I agree with you

You're confusing monthly active users with regular users here. Zynga's daily active users (i.e. regular users) is actually around 20-25% of their monthly numbers. De-duped, that means they have around 20-25 million players (going on those November numbers, which haven't really grown since then for most developers, Zynga included).

What happened (as I predicted in December in fact http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/TadhgKelly/20091…) is that the various social developers had become very reliant on short term attention spam tactics to acquire lots of users very quickly, and Facebook killed off that pipe. At the same time, the rate of growth of Facebook users has slowed down, resulting in more “veteran” users (who've been through at least one game and got bored of it and less “novices”. This combination has effectively ended the cheap-and-cheerful phase of social game development and is creating a lot of interesting risky behaviours (such as cross-wall posting, which I'm pretty sure is against the terms of service, or abuse of the email facility). I expect there will be a further set of smackdowns handed around soon.

What it means in general is that the social app economy is having to move away, inch by inch from the fake-viral place that it has existed in for a while (a lot of app developers talk about Facebook as “viral” when what they actually meant was “free advertising channels”), and into the realm of true-viral (where users start sharing games in their feeds off their own volition because they are genuinely awesome). That requires a completely different kind of software company, one which none of the social developers can really lay claim to at the moment.

With Facebook's recent changes, and the impending others, growth for applications, in general, will be stunted.

There's really only two other places users are: the rest of the web (admittedly distributed across hundreds of thousands/ millions of websites) and mobile.