DiscoveryBeat: Zynga’s tips for social gaming success

Bill Mooney, general manager of Zynga’s insanely popular social game FarmVille, offered his advice for social game developers today at VentureBeat’s DiscoveryBeat 2009 event in San Francisco. Speed seemed to be the theme uniting his different ideas. The social game industry is changing quickly and unpredictably, he said, and companies need to keep up.

“This space is much, much faster than a traditional space,” Mooney said, later adding, “A week is a month, a month is a quarter, and a quarter is a year.”

In order to adapt to those changing circumstances, Mooney repeated advice that’s offered to many web startups: You need to measure how you’re doing, and change your plans accordingly. A commonly cited data point is a site or application’s monthly users, but Mooney said Zynga is more interested in daily active users, as well other numbers that don’t just show how many people a game has reached, but also how many play it again and again.

“We don’t care about apps that don’t have good engagement rates and retention,” he said.

Another tip: Hire employees for intelligence rather than experience. That goes back to the earlier point about speed, because you need people who can react quickly. Diverse backgrounds help too, Mooney said.

He was also emphatic about which business model works — virtual goods. At Zynga, virtual goods make up more than 90 percent of revenue, dwarfing other sources like advertising. One of the audience members asked about the possibility of a subscription business model, and Mooney said subscriptions shouldn’t be a social gaming company’s focus, though that may change in two or three years.

Beyond the big ideas, Mooney made some fun, quick observations. While discussing retention, for example, he asked conference attendees how many had played FarmVille. For folks who hadn’t, he said, “Don’t go into this business.” And he was serious, because if you haven’t checked out the competition, you’re probably in trouble.

Another attendee asked about Zynga’s iPhone games. After all, Mooney emphasized developing, measuring, and improving games quickly, but how, the audience member wondered, does Zynga achieve that speed on the iPhone?

“We can’t,” he said. That’s why Zynga separated the development process for its social network games, where it can iterate more quickly, and its iPhone games.