Thus is given to us the potential greatness and expected obstacles.
According to this article, Zynga's April 2010 revenue was 50 Million. This is good news for anyone creating a facebook game. Because, while the industry is "block buster driven" most of us will be satisfied if we ever become one tenth of one percent as good as Zynga is. That would be 50 thousand in one month, by the way.
The article is a bit dated, but it is here for your enlightenment.
Zynga creates, launches, and manages games better than any other company. Games are a hit-driven business and have become more like Hollywood blockbusters in their heavy development costs and large marketing budgets. It is not inconceivable for EA to spend many years and $100 million to create and market a new game.
Zynga does this at a fraction of the time and cost. For example, the company took just 5 months and 25 people to launch Café World, which now boasts close to 30 million players. The company did this for likely under $10 million in development and $20 million – $30 million in marketing. So it has both a development and marketing cost advantage over EA and other traditional gaming companies.
There is one other article. Such as the complicated relationship between Zynga and Facebook, which can be found here. Facebook, is moving over to facebook credits. This might a be a huge adjustment for facebook gamers.
Facebook could force Zynga to adjust its math. More than 90% of the company's revenues come from users converting real cash into proprietary virtual currency. FarmVille, for example, has Farm Coins. Say you buy a tractor for 5,000 Farm Coins, which equals about $3.30. Typically the company pays less than 10% of that to a third-party transaction handler such as PayPal and keeps the rest. (In March, PayPal said Zynga was its second-largest merchant after eBay.)
Facebook is testing a service called Facebook Credits that would offer a single virtual currency for use on many different apps. If the social network forces app makers to use Facebook Credits, as some developers expect will happen this year, Zynga would have to pay the company up to 30% of every transaction. "If Credits become pervasive, I don't think Pincus can stop it. It's going to hit the margin," says Peter Relan, executive chairman of CrowdStar, one of Zynga's many competitors.
I invite everyone's thoughts. Specifically, if you were to monetize a facebook, how comfortable are you with "facebook credits" and what would you need to know? Furthermore, on a shoe-string budget, how do you think a game might be promoted?
Of course, one need only really imitate the masters. However, there is always room for improvement.
My suggestion might be to keep the code base as portable as possible. Facebook charging too much? Maybe move the game to Myspace. Perhaps it becomes a Firefox add-on that it just advertised through Facebook. Perhaps the game could become an iPhone app. Maybe it could be both. This way you aren't locked in to a platform and necessarily at the mercy of their TOS.
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