Another change in management at Zynga... another faint hope that perhaps now they will actually listen and DO SOMETHING to fix the exodus of players.
Honestly though...I'm not sure that Farmville CAN be fixed any more... have they left it too late?
Some of us are still around though... we know the game is dead and should be buried... but we remember what it once was and stick around... always hoping...
So...what WOULD it take for Farmville to stop the mass exodus?
What would they need to do to win you - and your money - back?
For me, what they would need to do is LESS. Much less.
Less new trees, horses, birds on a stick, mastery signs, water features...what-the-hell-ever....
Remember the excitement over the owl on a stick that showed up in mystery boxes? It flew!!!
Had. To. Have. It.
It was unique - then. Now, I couldn't even tell you where my original owl is... but hey, I have about 30 ...maybe 40 ....other birds on a stick that fly ... big whoop.
Every time they manage to hit something we like, now, they go nuts.... oh look... they liked the space trees - lets make 6,457 more space trees and see if they'll pay 6 or 8 FC for each one. Uh ... no... no, we won't. How many times are you going to do this routine before it sinks in that overwhelming us with more of the same ain't going to work?
Chill out, settle down, and STOP overwhelming us with more of whatever-it-was-we-liked than we could ever possibly care about.
Less broken collections
Biggest mistake Zynga has made with Farmville - well, one of the biggest, anyway - was in the destruction of our collections.
I liked the trees. I can afford to buy FC to get the trees...and I used to. Now though, we are totally awash in trees. They release ridiculous numbers of new trees every week .... Monday, Thursday, in quests, as prizes for this, that, and the other thing, with each new farm release....
I can't possibly keep up. And many of them, if you missed them, too bad for you. Some of them even show up in ways that are on "slow rollout" - which means, actually - too bad for you - you're not in the favoured few who got that feature so no tree (or horse, or bird on a stick, or...what-the-hell-ever for you...
Collectors don't like to be thwarted. We really don't. Once you break our collections, we sulk, and we with-hold our money.
You want my money back? Smarten up!
It's too late to fix existing collections ... there are too many holes now.
You could, however, reboot the whole collector appeal thing with a bit of creativity.
Me, I still like the trees - and I still think that the people who design & draw the trees for Zynga are amazing. So ... let's think of a way to fix the tree problem, shall we?
My suggestion would be to develop a level 3 tree.
Go back to the very beginning - look at the old level 1s and 2s ...and now make a level 3 for those sets. Still has to grow in the groves/orchards (don't even THINK about a new structure!) - but to make it different from the ones we know, have the seedlings grow into either the old level 1 or 2, or a clone of itself.
This will allow - eventually - people who missed out on early trees to complete their collection.
The important thing here is that you MUST restrict these new trees to no more than 1 or 2 per week.
Now think about other things that people liked - or might like - to collect.
Not sure how to fix/re-boot those? Ask us... I bet people in the forums would be thrilled to be asked for feedback if it was actually going to be used. No doubt there are other ways that the whole trees debacle could be approached, also ...
The key thing here, though, is that you MUST limit items to no more than 1/2 week so that whatever-it-is remain worth having, and collectible.
Well darn. I've gone on quite long enough for one blog post already and have barely even scratched the surface! Lots more I want less of ... but that's a topic for another post - or two :)
In the meantime...what do you think? Is it too late to save Farmville? If not, what does Zynga need to do to win you - and your money - back?
So many so very lousy decisions that have been made at Zynga over the past more than a year now... I, like many many others, am beyond frustrated with how persistently they have been focussed on nothing but shooting themselves in the foot (they apparently have a LOT of feet!) .... but seriously?
If you read the article about the class action lawsuit, you will see that they are basing their action on the notion that
(i) the Company was experiencing a rapid decline in the number of users for its
existing web based games;
(ii) the Company was experiencing substantial delays
in launching new web based games;
(iii) the Company was failing to take
advantage of the changes on Facebook's web platform;
(iv) the Company was unable
to effectively monetize revenues from mobile devices through its web based
games; and
(v) as a result of the above, the Company's financial statements were
materially false and misleading at all relevant times.
Ludicrous! It takes seconds to use Google to find out how well (or not) Zynga has been ~retaining~ players. (It's not, btw - they've been leaving in droves and for very good reasons).
The forums for each and every Zynga game are wide open - you don't even have to play a single game or create an account to wander through and have a read. And of course, there are plenty of other blogs and wikis and fan sites and news articles and.... give me a break!
If potential investors couldn't be bothered to spend 10 minutes having a look, they deserve what they got.
If they didn't, well ...as my brother would say .... "wah". So now you've figured out that you blew it and want to do something about it? How 'bout instead of wasting your time & energy on lawsuits that reveal that you didn't take any time at all to research anything before you jumped, you spend a few minutes demanding that Zynga smarten the hell up and listen to its players? Far more productive.
They do have, among their many offerings, some winners... or would-be-winners if they could just stop with the foot-shooting thing for awhile.
Fortunately, there is, finally, a tiny glimmer of hope that things might be about to improve at Zynga!
Apparently this John Schappert dude has been there about a year - and that is about how long things have been going really REALLY badly - if he WAS the sabateur that has been so intently driving Farmville and other games in to the ground, perhaps things might get better now?
I'd be happier if they had not just demoted him, but got rid of him entirely - and I think that they really do need some new blood in there, or at the very least, an advisory board of players for each of the games (that they actually LISTEN to)....
but maybe, just maybe......
Oh look.... what a surprise... Zynga's stock is dropping in value and is now down to $8/share.
Duh.
The only surprise to me is that anyone actually invested in the first place. I mean, come on? Who looks at a company, sees that it has already burned through millions of customers and is now on a consistantly downward trend in every way that counts - daily users? monthly users? profits? .... and thinks "hey...I wanna get in on that" ?
I'll tell you who - other people that missed school on the same day that the Zynga folks did... the one where the teacher explained that it is easier (and cheaper) to keep the customers you have than it is to get new ones all the time. S/he probably also mentioned, I would think, that it is also easier (and cheaper) to get new ones that it is to get the old ones that you irked into leaving back.
I don't play any Zynga games but Farmville so I can't talk (much) about those - I have tried a fair number of them though, and in every case, left for similar reasons... the same reasons that people talk about all the time in the forums, on their facebook walls, and so on ... too many quests, too much tedium, too much begging required. The reasons we say to hell with it and shut down our cafes or fishtanks or pioneer village or cities or whatever are not secrets - but they might as well be, cuz Zynga certainly doesn't have a clue.
The ~funny~ thing is that the very same (obnoxious) things that caused so many of us to quit all of Zynga's other games are now being ported right into Farmville..... We stayed with Farmville because it was different - it allowed us to do things our way, to make our own decisions about where to put what, what to plant, etc etc...
Now....? Not so much.
Now we have quests - complete with obnoxious icons on the side of our farms that won't go away unless and until the quests are completed. So we all end up being told what to grow, in what order, and how many of each we need... what critters to harvest... what crafts to make... what to collect.... hello....? Zynga...? We loved Farmville because it allowed us to decide.... not you.
And we have buildables. Each with their own myriad of stupid building materials required. It wasn't bad enough that our boards, nails and bricks are no longer good enough to build all the crap they demand that we build (and if you try to bypass it, they'll remind you over & over & over) - now they change the building materials half way through, also. So you wind up with bunches of totally useless building parts halfway through each building project.
It really isn't rocket science. All that is required is a basic understanding of how farmville players are different from other game players.
And again ... no secrets... the forums are FILLED with discussions that clearly state what is needed, what annoys us, and what is causing so many to first, stop coughing up real money for farmcash and ultimately to stop playing altogether....
We want shared storage. WE want to decide what theme(s) we want to use on each farm, and what items belong there. It irks us to have a whole bunch of ice, snow, Christmas items that we can't move into Winter Wonderland. It irks us to have had to place things on Winter Wonderland (for the stupid quests we didn't really want to do in the first place) and now not to be able to move them to the farm where we DO want them. My jingle bell horse belongs on my main farm with my other horses. That is where my horses belong. MY choice, dammit... and the fact that you won't let me do it my way is a constant irritant.
We want rotatable buildings (and pens). We are control freaks, okay? We like to decorate and to have choices. That's why we play Farmville. A building that can't be turned restricts our decorating options and annoys the hell out of us.
We like pretty, we Farmville players.... we gripe about things like foals that are as big as or bigger than their parents, gaps that can't be filled caused by a lack of attention to footprints around things like ponds and so on, and moats, tracks & fences that can't be properly lined up.
We are collectors.... we like to have ALL of....whatever.... for me it is trees; others like mastery signs, horses, sheep...what the hell ever.... you have created a game that appeals to collectors ... and a great many choices of things one might collect .... what would then possess you to destroy people's collections? How many times do we have to tell you that once you break a collection (by wiping out people's limited edition crop gardens with your stupid turbo boost and refusing to fix it, for example, or by making a tree available only to those able & willing to donate to a particular cause; or by putting horses into the mystery game, or... how many ways HAVE you found to break our collections, Zynga? How does it benefit you?) ...anyway ... once the collection is incomplete, it is no fun any more and people find it much much easier to walk away .... to stop buying ....and again... to stop playing.
And hey...did I mention that we are control freaks? We do not care to be ignored, lied to, disrespected, or treated like naughty children for having opinions.... not in the game, and not in the forum either.
Zynga had a good thing going... but they spent most of 2011 shooting themselves in the foot .... over and over and over again.... and refusing to listen to their customers.
At least in Farmville... I'm guessing, though, after looking at the stats for a few other games, that this lack of respect, concern and basic understanding of what motivates us goes far further than just FV.
No surprise at all to me that their stock price is heading in the wrong direction... in fact, I think it is exactly the RIGHT direction.
