As games like Zynga’s smash hit FarmVille stormed their way in the hearts of social networking junkies everywhere, traditional game developers and publishers were seemingly left scratching their heads. Last year, EA’s $300 million purchase of PlayFish, another social networking game maker, assured us that the big boys were taking notice of the success of such games. In fact, just this week, it was reported that Google invested over $100 million in Zynga. Some publishers and developers, it seems, have missed the opportunity.
In the short time since Mark Pincus founded Zynga it’s become one of the most recognized developers in the business of making games. Not bad for a company formed in 2007. According Zynga’s official website, FarmVille has roughly 30 million farms, while around 240 million different people play the company’s games every day. The free-to-play system that’s been recently gaining popularity, combined with the rise in Facebook users and the increasing importance of online gaming created a perfect storm (to use a cliché) for Zynga’s infiltration of the social gaming market.
Meanwhile, another farming favorite, Harvest Moon, a series that has been around since the mid-90s, sits in a more niche spot on the gaming spectrum. While its apparent that the game is doing very well in terms of sales (Well, it’s doing good enough to warrant several sequels and spin-offs) we can’t help but look at FarmVille and think that this could have been an online evolution of the Harvest Moon series.
Playing Harvest Moon requires a console or handheld, and a copy of the game. FarmVille, on the other hand, is browser-based. In an age where the majority of households and workplaces have computers with high-speed internet connections, a game such as FarmVille was the perfect opportunity for a developer like Zynga.
“I thought in 2007 that something had gone oddly wrong with the whole internet experience,” Pincus once told CNN, he expected that games should have been “one of the top two or three experiences [on the internet].”
The browser-based, casual nature of a game such as FarmVille makes it something that any player can easily pick up, play and put down within a minute or two–enough to check on their farm and harvest some crops. In the same interview with CNN, Pincus said that these games were built so that they, “could be played in a tab on your browser while you’re on a conference call.” Harvest Moon has players invest more time per session than FarmVille, which is labeled as a casual game. FarmVille also has the advantage of smaller scale development than a retail game. Software like Flash is much easier to access than a development kit for any of the major systems. The reduced production costs also allow for a Zynga to let people play their game at no charge. That’s something larger-scale projects can’t afford.
FarmVille’s free-to-play model gives players the game at no cost, but uses microtransactions to make money. It’s simple, there are millions of players out there, and many of them are willing to shell out a few bucks here, and a few bucks there. It seems to be paying off, because a Business Week reports that the company is projected to surpass $450 million in 2010…that’s a lot of farms.
Traditionally (before the days of DLC), console games charge a one-time fee of about $50 bucks and the revenue stops there. When it comes to micro-transactions, the user can spend to their heart’s content, and sometimes that ends up running more than one would pay on a retail game.
Perhaps if Natsume had set aside some of the traditional ideas of game design and distribution, at least for one game, they may today be reaping the benefits of an extra source of income. At the very least, it could attract new fans to the Harvest Moon franchise.
