Читать книгу Platforms and Cultural Production - Thomas Poell - Страница 13

When, in 2007, a group of tech entrepreneurs developed a plan to launch their game studio Zynga (named after the pet bulldog of one of the co-founders), they opted for a then-novel – and undoubtedly risky – approach to game distribution and marketing. Rather than publishing on an existing gaming platform, such as Steam or the Nintendo Wii, they opted for Facebook. It was a bold move at the time: the social network’s userbase was still relatively small, and most end-users accessed the platform via desktops, rather than through mobile devices. But the founders seemed to sense the platform’s vast potential. More importantly, and crucial for Zynga’s success, Facebook had just launched the Facebook Development Platform, which provided outside companies with “deep integration” to “build a business around your Facebook application” (Nieborg & Helmond, 2019). In practice, this meant that external developers, such as Zynga, could access part of Facebook’s data infrastructure to build “social applications,” which were then accessible within the boundaries of the Facebook.com domain. One of those social applications was Texas Hold’em Poker. As one of the very first games to be played on Facebook, Zynga’s poker game marked the beginning of a new game format: the social game (Kerr, 2017).

By building its business around Facebook, Zynga was able to capitalize on the platform’s rapid growth, while exploiting the social relations among its users and, more pointedly, its ability to collect user data (Bodle, 2011). Here, it seems important to note that Facebook’s expansion followed an exponential growth curve – from 1 million end-users (2004), to 10 million (2006), to 100 million (2008), to more than 2 billion (2017). Two years after the initial success of its poker game, Zynga launched FarmVille – a farming-simulation game that at its peak counted more than 80 million monthly players. What made FarmVille such a blockbuster hit can be largely ascribed to the game’s accessibility: its rules are relatively straightforward, and playing it involves little skill other than logging in from time to time to attend one’s virtual farm. Heeding Facebook’s call, Zynga did indeed deeply integrate the game with the platform’s data infrastructure and social affordances. FarmVille players were not only continuously prompted to play alongside their Facebook friends, but they also could advance in the game much faster by recruiting new friends. Together with constant notifications about a player’s in-game progress, these requests to join the game were publicly shared on their News Feeds. Though the consistent stream of game updates annoyed Facebook users en masse, such communication served as a powerful publicity mechanism that assuredly enticed new players to join. And, crucially, Zynga didn’t contribute a single cent to this marketing blitz.

By integrating its technology and aligning its business model with Facebook, Zynga helped popularize the “freemium” business model for social games. Rather than opting for a premium revenue model – charging players a one-time access fee – the game developer generated revenue through a mix of advertising and optional in-game payments or “microtransactions” (Nieborg, 2015). As FarmVille was a freemium game, players could spend real money to buy exclusive virtual items to decorate their farms. Piggybacking on Facebook’s massive data-gathering efforts, Zynga started to conduct a large-scale data-mining operation of its own – not only to optimize gameplay but also to figure out which players were willing to pay (Arsenault, 2017; Willson & Leaver, 2015).¹ Zynga’s “intensely formalized” approach to game design – a commercially oriented and hyper-rationalized mode of data-driven game production (Keogh, 2019) – coupled with aggressive spamming tactics through Facebook’s News Feed, did not make Zynga popular among industry insiders (Victor, 2020). But Zynga executives seemed not to care. After all, only four years after the company was founded, Zynga secured a coveted spot on the Nasdaq stock exchange.

While the motivation to tap into Facebook’s userbase and its rich pool of user data makes Zynga’s position clear, the boon to Facebook is perhaps less obvious. What, then, was in this business partnership for Facebook? One answer is simply capital. At a crucial time in Facebook’s quest for market dominance, Zynga supplied hard cash.² Equally important, Zynga’s games generated traffic to Facebook and increased the time that users spent on the site. To make sure their crops did not wither, FarmVille players were constantly nudged to come to the platform at regular intervals (Burroughs, 2014). Initially, Zynga’s aggressiveness was the perfect match for an equally megalomaniacal Facebook.