Word: pincus
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FarmVille is part of Zynga, the fastest-growing, most buzzed-about social-game company of the moment. In October, Zynga operated six of the 10 most popular Facebook games: FarmVille, Cafe World, Mafia Wars, YoVille, zyngapoker and Roller Coaster Kingdom. Founded in July 2007 by Mark Pincus, 43, Zynga had 45 staffers by June 2008 and now employs 600, counting contractors. Its most recently launched game, FishVille, hooked 9 million users in a week. Zynga is privately held, but a rival less than half its size was recently bought by Electronic Arts, the GM of games, for $400 million...
...Pincus calls these the "golden mechanics." He learned them by trial and error, mainly while working on his two failed start-ups, Tribe.net and Supportsoft. He also has a behavioral psychologist on staff. Unlike traditional electronic games, which can't be changed much after they're shipped, Zynga's games constantly evolve in response to users' preferences, so they're more habit-forming. "They're making movies," he says of console-based-game creators. "What we're doing is more like weekly TV programming...
Zynga did not create the sketchy offers, which are outsourced, but neither did it have a handle on them. "We have always policed offers for content," says Pincus. "But there's thousands of offers and hundreds of new ones every week." Facebook and MySpace tightened their guidelines after getting complaints. Then a tech blogger confronted the CEO of a company that creates offers. She answered his accusations unwisely ("S___, double s___ and bulls___"), and it blew up online. Also on the Internet: footage of Pincus speaking at a University of California, Berkeley, event about how he funded his start...
Besides, these cookies by any other name might not bear the same significance for devotees, like Currier sophomore Liza Pincus...
...Mark Pincus of Zynga, the largest and most profitable of the social-networking game companies, (it created FarmVille, Mafia Wars and Cafe World) was quick to respond. "I agree with [Arrington] and others that some of these offers misrepresent and hurt our industry," he wrote on his blog. "We have worked hard to remove bad offers ... Nevertheless we need to be more aggressive and have revised our service-level agreements." He also took down all offers that involve sending a mobile-phone number. Offerpal, the biggest provider of offer advertising, also apparently responded quickly, replacing CEO Anu Shukla, shortly after...