Back during the Game Developers Conference, IndustryGamers had a chance to sit down with Mark Skaggs, VP of Product Development at the leading social games company Zynga. Skaggs oversaw the production of Zynga's biggest social game property FarmVille, and he has a wealth of experience in the games business. Over 17 years he's picked up 2 AIAS awards, gone through four console transitions and he's been involved in creating games which have sold over 16 million copies at retail. Skaggs has worked on multi-million selling RTS games such as Command and Conquer: Red Alert 2, Command and Conquer: Generals and Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle-earth. Coming from the traditional games business, he has some unique perspective on the transition to digital and the social games boom.
IndustryGamers: The big buzzword throughout GDC has been social gaming. Wherever you go, there are people talking about the incredible growth of games on Facebook, and naturally Zynga is leading that charge. So how is it that this almost seemed to sneak up on us like this?
Mark Skaggs: I think it snuck up on people because the cycles are much faster in the web world. Think of if the game industry started moving at the speed of the web and web developments and site developments and that basically…in the time table of traditional gaming, you start the project and two years later you’re done. Well, so, a bunch of people started the project about 2 years ago, a year and a half ago, they’re still working on it, their heads are down and in the meantime all this social games stuff has happened. So they look up and it's changed. Not because they weren’t paying attention, but because they were busy in the middle of something. The idea of it I think is that social games finally tap into that Holy Grail that I think traditional games [have missed] - at least when I was doing the RTS games, I was trying to get a broader audience, more casual, more players in on it, expose more people to this entertainment experience. I think what happened is it just kind of hit that tipping point where it’s like, “Wow, wait a minute there’s a lot of people that do it.” And because there’s this social network connection, it spreads like wildfire. I think it’s the players and the opportunity and the web speed.
IG: What is Zynga doing differently that has put you guys way out front? A game like FarmVille - it’s just mind blowing the number of people that are playing that game.
MS: Yeah, it is.
IG: I mean, there are a number of other social gaming companies out there, but they haven’t achieved quite that level of success. What is the special sauce that Zynga has?
MS: I can’t tell you the special sauce. I think, really, it’s a great combo of web and game cultures and a huge amount of experienced people inside the company on both sides of the equation. So if there’s any secret - but it’s not really a secret - one of the things that I think is so special about Zynga is there’s a lot of people that have a tremendous amount of experience. It’s not their first time through. They’ve had other companies before; they’ve been in one aspect of the business for a long time and they kind of know it. And there’s just more of just all the items, all the issues kind of converge, and it comes back to the opportunity to reach the most players, the vast amount of games, the right amount of web savvy, on how to market the games to all the players. I think that’s what it is. And we also just use a pretty metrics-driven approach, so we don’t get too full of ourselves. I just gave a talk before and…in FarmVille we had this top link and we were sure when the team said, “We’ll put a link up there. It’ll be red. It’ll be the most obvious thing it could be. They’ll click it. It‘ll be all good.” The CEO comes by and says, “Did you test every color?” And we’re like, “What do you mean? Red shows up the best. Of course - red, red, red.” Well, we tested all the colors and it turned out the pink link, which was not as easily visible, showed much better results. So that kind of metrics-driven approach just keeps us from getting too full of ourselves and saying, “Well, we know all the answers.” Instead we like... to get the answers.
IG: Do you feel that that metrics-driven approach limits creativity though? I went to a panel with David Perry and a Playfish exec was there and was discussing social gaming, and Warren Spector, who is almost a self proclaimed luddite, was saying “I’d rather quit making games than have to do a metrics-driven approach to game design.” It's like there's this battle between the creative side and really designing games where you have to follow the metrics. So do you feel like you have that creative expression if you’re so focused on the metrics and the analytics?
MS: Yeah, actually. Totally. Here’s the whim... This is part of the talk I gave before. I showed a metrics-driven approach that we used way back on Command and Conquer Generals to tune the levels, to tune the missions. Here’s what you win with the metrics based approach. You don’t have to work as hard. You go, “What - wait a minute- oh, that means you’re slacking it?” No, no, no. You’re still bringing your creativity to it, but you’re not wringing your hands going “Man, I’ve got to make this decision and they’re going to print a million PlayStation3 discs and if I get it wrong that’s a lot of money blown.” Instead, you go, “Look- this could work. This is kind of fun too..this is kind of fun too.,.well let’s test them.” And in a way, it frees you up in the creative part of your brain to not worry about “Is it right?” You can try all this stuff and find out.
So I think some people mistake what a metrics-driven approach is. It doesn’t mean you throw out the creativity. You’ve got to start somewhere. Like in that link test I was talking about, “Hey, there’s red. You’ve got to test some other colors. Well, how about purple? How about green? How about pink, right? Yellow?” You test them out and you go, “Wow, this is really cool, because now I know that this one does better.” And the other piece is a metrics-driven approach can get you to a local maximum on the curve of goodness. Anybody who’s smart knows that may not mean the ultimate goodness. So we go, “What would we do different? How are we going to jump that trough to get to the next one?” It sounds funny and not just because I’m on Zynga, but I also worked on Generals and we used this approach on level tuning and it’s more like…here’s a question I pose back - is having a staff and music notation giving away a key to great music? No, it doesn’t, it’s a frame up. You can use it.
IG: So when you look at the social gaming sector, it’s all very young still, and there are a few major players and obviously Zynga’s at the top of that list. You have Playfish, you have Playdom, Crowstar and a few others. It’s still a pretty limited group. What do you see as the growth path for that sector of the industry? How much potential is there? Where is it going?
MS: I think there’s a lot and here’s my opinion... Right now, everyone thinks social gaming equates to Facebook games and the industry is going to change. Facebook’s not always going to be the answer. They’re tremendous partners for Zynga; they’re really great. They manage the ecosystem well, they’re really, really great people, but I also know that other competitors are going, “Hey, Facebook, 400 million users. Wow. We want some of that action. We want to be in that space.” There’s other folks that’ll come. Just like in the console business, there were more console makers that came up. What I see from a meta point of view is that it’s going to turn into a situation where more and more traditional games are going to integrate social aspects into them. So I was at AdWeek.com looking at an article that someone posted on Facebook. I go there, I clicked over it, it had a bar on the bottom that knew I was logged into Facebook and served up some information that was relevant to me. You look at that and you go, “Well, you can do that with cookies and tricks.” And, yeah, you can, but that only touches on the surface of it. So thinking about traditional games - oh, by the way, I’m thinking maybe next year or the year after, we’ll stop saying “social games” and we’ll just start saying games. And if you don’t have social in your games, you’re going to feel old fashioned. Do they say, ”Hey, that’s a solo player game or a multiplayer game” anymore? Not really. If you don’t have multiplayer aspects to it, it’s looked at as a little old fashioned.
IG: Well, they are a different category of games, at least the types of games that Zynga makes. I mean, I’m sure there are hardcore players that do spend a lot of time with them but it is a little bit of a different demographic, a lot of middle aged females. What kind of information do you have on the hardcore gamer that plays that? What kind of overlap do you see?
MS: Well, I always refer back to the Facebook demographics, because there’s your target market. More than 50% of the people on Facebook are over 35. Only 25% are under 25. So you look at that and you go, “Wow, the traditional hardcore market...that’s a subset of the overall Facebook market.” If you go into that market thinking that you can bring a really hardcore first person shooter there, most of your audience isn’t going to want it, so why do it? The flip side is, if you can take some of the social aspects that have been explored in this new space and bring it down to a console experience, I think that’s a big win. So that’s why I think at the end of the day it’s not so much about “Is it a Facebook game or farming game or first person shooter?” I think it’s going to all converge together.
