Comments on: Is Zynga’s Farmville.com A Sign of Things to Come or a Clever Hedge?

By: FarmVille Guru

FarmVille Guru — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 14:10:13 +0000

If you’re sick and tired of running around totally broke while other players get barns and greenhouses and the most expensive villa, this information is for you.

You’ve probably always wondered why you can’t seem to make as much money or level up as fast as the other players in the game.

Learn more : http://www.farmville-secrets.tk

I used to wonder the same thing. I thought,

“Where are these people making money so fast?”
“Are they buying it on FarmVille?”
“What are they growing and selling?”

So I set out to spy on all the successful players I could find to see just what they did to earn all of their money and to level up so fast.

Learn more : http://www.farmville-secrets.tk

By: Zynga Hits 200M Monthly Active Users on Facebook, Spreads Further with Mafia Wars Toolbar, FarmVille.com

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 19:37:07 +0000

[...] the Facebook app, then we’ll likely see more. For a more thorough exploration of this topic, see Charles Hudson’s post, here. To dig deeper into the virtual goods market, check out our new report: Inside Virtual Goods: The [...]

By: chudson

chudson — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:36:22 +0000

Matt,

I think you're asking a lot of the right questions. As for question #1, I think the folks at places like IMVU, Gaia, and others have been trying to solve these problems for awhile. It's clearly hard to do, but there are some learnings that can be borrowed.

The harder challenge, though, is what you raise in #3 – how can you re-engage users on a regular basis when you need to drive them back to a standalone destination and not a top independent destination like Facebook.

By: mattmaroon

mattmaroon — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 12:37:35 +0000

We're definitely looking into moving our games onto the web. There still are some pretty big questions we'll need to answer before it becomes our sole focus though.

1. Do web-based viral channels work well? Can you do invites via email/IM succesfully? Clearly you can allow people to send and unlimited amount of them, but what's the response rate? If you reward people for invites, how much work do you have to do to prevent multi-accounting from deflating your virtual economy?

2. What does it cost to buy traffic from Google/Yahoo/etc. and how much reach is there?

3. As you mentioned, how do RPUs compare? Can you keep people coming back as easily?

I hope to find out these things in the near future.