Computer Support Blog

If you play games on Facebook, you know about Farmville. No matter your opinion on the game itself, there is no denying that Farmville is a huge success. As is Zynga, the company that created Farmville.

Zynga currently has four of the past year’s top ten games on Facebook, according to Gameinformer. These games, of which Farmville was not one, were ranked based on how highly players recommended the games.

Zynga’s Farmville remains a very popular game, even if it did not make that list. How and why is it so popular? Why do people play a game where they have to run a farm? How does Zynga make money from these free Facebook games?

First, Zynga designs all of their games to be social games played with friends. Therefore, the biggest draw for people to play the game is competition – they want to make their farm bigger and better than all of their friends’ farms.

Another reason people play is that many urban people have a romanticized view of country life and farming. Farmville, and all other games like it, play directly into that fantasy of what owning a farm would be like. It does not matter that Farmville is nothing like an actual farm because that is not what the players would want. They want to tend their virtual crops and feed their virtual animals without having to bother with any of the realities of farming. That is what games are for after all.

Zynga does not require people to pay to play their Facebook games, but it offers extra items players buy with real money to enhance game play. No one has to buy these things in order to keep playing the game, but a surprising number of people do buy them in order to make their farm just a little better than their friends’ farms. People trust Zynga’s in game purchasing with their credit card information and Zynga has maintained a high level of Internet security for its players’ information.

Zynga makes most of their money from these in-game purchases, but they also make a lot of money from hosting offers that reward players for clicking on them. If a player wants to earn the items that can be bought, they could sign up for Netflix. Companies pay Zynga for hosting offers like these whenever a player signs up for one.

As Zynga relies on Facebook for the majority of their income, they are at Facebook’s mercy. Zynga, which just went public recently, might be in trouble from some new Facebook policies. Facebook is about to start charging game developers a cut of their profits for hosting their games on the site. Meanwhile, Zynga is attempting to diversify their platform by breaking into the iPhone app market. This can be a difficult endeavor and many companies do not survive the transition. The question Zynga needs to ask is will their devoted Farmville players follow when they move or will the players move onto other Facebook-based games?

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For More Information, Contact:

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Filed under: david milman, facebook, Internet, Internet Security, rescuecom