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Zynga's mobile boss David Ko talks smartphone and tablet gaming(Guardian Web Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) The bulk of social games publisher Zynga's revenues come from its games on Facebook. However, the company is investing significantly in mobile gaming too, having built a team under former Yahoo executive David Ko, and acquired several mobile development studios around the world. I interview Ko in Zynga's San Francisco office the day before Facebook's f8 conference, the same week as it launched an Android version of its popular mobile title Hanging With Friends, while also adding new features and in-app payments to the iOS version. "We believe that mobile represents a new social gaming frontier," says Ko. "We've always said we want Zynga to be the best content creators in the world, and we are platform agnostic. More and more of our players are not just accessing their favourite games from their PC, but from their mobile devices: they want the experience on their mobiles and tablets, and we want to deliver that." Zynga is no newcomer to mobile games: it released Zynga Poker early in the App Store's life in 2008. However, in interviews at the time, chief executive Mark Pincus told me that the lack of built-in viral mechanisms on iPhone - this was in the days before Facebook Connect - was an inhibiting factor for social games like Zynga's. According to Ko, Pincus is now more optimistic. "Mark believes that mobile really has the potential to live up to its expectations that we've all been talking about," he says. "We see more and more players accessing stuff from their mobile devices. Sometimes they want an experience that mimics what they're seeing on their PC, and sometimes they want something very customised for their mobile device." Zynga has done both: the iOS version of FarmVille mirrors the version on Facebook, you play the same farm across both. More recently, though, CityVille got a standalone mobile game called CityVille Hometown. Some rewards earned in the latter translated into the former, but otherwise they were separate cities: separate games. "The market is very fragmented today, with iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone… It's a fragmented industry, and we're trying to figure out what the best experience is for these devices," says Ko. "Our job is to tailor the experience for those people, and while you may see a more fragmented experience on mobile today, I do believe over time you'll see a consolidation of that experience." Words With Friends has become the first Zynga game to start on mobile – it was originally developed as an iPhone game by developer Newtoy, which was then acquired in December 2010 – but subsequently be turned into a Facebook game. Ko says this made for an interesting conversion process, and possibly a better one than simply porting Facebook games to mobiles. "So many times, developers think 'we can build for the PC, then take features away to optimise it for the mobile device', so it's essentially a different experience," he says. "But in this case, it was going from small to big. What was the best thing we can build for mobile, centred around performance, speed and user fun, and then build that out for a tablet and then a PC?" Ko says Zynga is also trying to figure out how best to use specific features of mobile devices, like cameras, accelerometers and the touchscreens. Meanwhile, he is also "very bullish" on tablets, citing his own experience of using his PC less at home since getting a tablet When deciding which existing Zynga games to bring from Facebook to mobile devices, Ko says his team does a lot of brainstorming, with people on one game's team invited to suggest ideas based on other titles – "just because you work in the mobile poker division doesn't mean you can't have ideas for things in the fashion industry or a CityVille Hometown type of game" – and says that there will be more mobile games which, like that latter title, link into their Facebook versions with specific quests and rewards. Ko is enthusiastic about the improvement in mobile and tablet hardware, as well as the speed of mobile networks. He warns, however, that Zynga is not intending to make use of specific features for the sake of it. "It's one thing many people miss: 'look at this cool function, let's just incorporate it'. They don't ask themselves the key question about whether it's fun. There are things we could use on the device but chose not to, because we don't think it's fun and neither do our players. It's something we always come back to as a company: is it fun? We ask that question every step of the way in the development process." One technology predicted to spark fun times for mobile social game developers is HTML5, with the suggestion that their games will move back to the browser on mobile devices. Zynga already has a foot in mobile web gaming, having launched a browser-based mobile version of Mafia Wars. It has also acquired a couple of companies with technology relating to this area: Sapos Media and Dextrose. Meanwhile, Facebook is expected to unveil something called Project Spartan in the next few weeks, extending its web applications platform to mobile, providing a browser-based rival ecosystem to the Apple and Google app stores. Zynga will surely be heavily involved, although Ko unsurprisingly talks more generally about its ambitions. "For very new platform that's introduced, if our players are asking for us to be on those platforms, we want to be there," he says. "HTML5 is interesting, although I do feel it is early. With those acquisitions, you can see into our thinking in this area a little bit." Every mobile game developer and their aunt seems to be diving into the free-to-play social mobile games market at the moment, which Ko says he welcomes – "the competition will make everybody in the ecosystem get better". He's also keeping tabs on a host of developers, with an eye to potential partnerships (or even acquisitions, presumably). He does have a warning for studios who think it is easy cracking the freemium business model. "The barriers to entry are low, but it's hard to scale those games, come out with new games and iterate quickly," he says. "Some of the biggest titles out there in the industry had to go through many iterations to get to where they're at. The bar is low to get in, but high to develop high-quality and fun games that come out one after the other. And that's the key: they've got to be fun." (c) 2011 Guardian Newspapers Limited. |