I/

Presentation of Zynga

Zynga is a leading developer of the world's most popular social games.

Headquartered in San Francisco, their mission is to connect the world
through games, and since 2007, more than one billion people have played
one of their franchises like FarmVille, Zynga Poker and Words With Friends.
In 2014, they acquired NaturalMotion, an Oxford-based mobile game and
technology developer and the creator of hits like CSR Racing and Clumsy
Ninja. They have in total 25 games : Bubble Safari, CastleVille Legends,
Chess with Friends, Draw Something, Empires and Allies, FarmVille,
FarmVille 2, FarmVille 2: Country Escape, FarmVille: Harvest Swap, Gems
With Friends, Hanging With Friends, Hit It Rich!, Looney Tunes Dash, Mafia
Wars, Matching With Friends, NFL Showdown, Ninja Kingdom, Scramble
With Friends, Solstice Arena, What's The Phrase, Wizard of Oz Slots, Words
On Tour, Words With Friends, Zynga Poker, Zynga Poker Classic
Zynga is named after founder Mark Pincus late bulldog Zinga, and the
legacy of her playful and loyal nature continues to inspire their company
culture.
Some figures:

More than 400 million people have played FarmVille and FarmVille 2

More than 55 million matches of Words With Friends are being

played at any given moment
130 million hands of poker are played each day in Zynga Poker
Zynga.org, a social organization:
Since its inception in 2009, Zynga.org has enabled players to donate over
$20 million through more than 150 in-game campaigns benefiting 50
nonprofit organizations. Zynga employees have donated more than
$750,000 to nonprofits they feel passionately about and contributed nearly
9,000 volunteer hours to create positive outcomes. In 2013, Zynga.org
partnered with NewSchools Venture Fund to create co.lab, an education
technology accelerator focused on enhancing the quality and reach of
learning games and apps.
Here is a small presentation of
https://vimeo.com/79463346#embed

gamer

involved

in

Zynga.org :

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II/ Zynga and big data

In this technical part, I will ask a lot of questions, start to answer to this
and I will, during the oral presentation, try to go deeper and to explain you
our point of view.
Zynga is not only a global game development company, it is also a big
data giant. In a few words, the company deals with terabytes of data every
day (15TB of semi-structured data), uses a giant server infrastructure and
use all this data to improve games. They do a lot of analysis,
experimentation, streaming, mining and reporting.

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40% of the company employees can access to every data analysis and contribute
to the improvement of the system.
There is an important point to develop. The relationship between Zynga and big
data.
Does it use it too much? Are they capable to deal with so much data? Does it
destroy art and creativity? Do they sell apps and satisfy customer thanks to big
data analysis?
First, they belong to the 18% of the massive big data users. Figures are clear, this
is huge, there is no place for doubt and random. However, did it avoid the 2011
crisis? I dont think so. We may even wonder if they will be able to keep
increasing their capacity to such an amazing rhythm? Its a matter of time,
money and also storage capacity. They seem capable of doing this, without a lot
of problem, their infrastructure is one of the biggest in the world and their work
with Vertica and Hadoop to deal with everything. Storage technology is always
improving, size is reducing, capacity improving and price decreasing. However, is
there no limit to this progress?
Creativity, art, are major questions in app development world. It is absolutely
impossible to launch a game app without creation. It could seem opposed to
those metrics. However, it would be a mistake to think so, and I will explain why.
When you create, you dont know if your result will be good enough for
everybody. Will you satisfy any kind of consumer? This is absolutely impossible.
Universality cant be the product of this process. Or at least, if we let creativity
alone, it cant be. But if we add a great consideration for data, for consumer
behavior, to gamer advices, to gamer problems, questions or whatever, in this
case, we can get closer to universality. If you know what is good for every player,
with terabytes of data you can deal with every single day, you can anticipate
wishes, dreams!
Yes, there was a crisis, thats fully true. But, Apple was not so famous before the
iPhone, on the other side, Nokia collapsed when they did not follow the
smartphones trends and Rovio failed to adapt to cloud technology and lost so
many users
It may not be the best idea ever to use big data in each and every decision, but is
intuition better?
They sold apps before to adapt to consumers, they just sold and make them
happier thanks to this analysis. The part on the crisis explain better what exactly
happened.

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III/ The Zyngas Crisis

2010, more than 60 million people are playing every day at ones of
Zyngas games. Zynga shows a perfect economic health and seems to
have found its players (casual gamers) through some famous games like
Farmville or Mafia Wars. Players can make in-app purchases with credit
card payment or through PayPal, Zynga is just behind Ebay and is actually
the second biggest client of PayPal.
The situation changed after May 2010 and the wake of Facebooks
requiring exclusive use of Facebook Credits for monetization in
applications, Zynga was threatening to leave Facebook because the
commission increased from 2-10% to 30% with the Facebook credits.
According to the BBC, approximately 80% of Zyngas revenue comes from
Facebook users and to show how close are Facebook And Zynga there was
in 2010 a five-year agreement to exclusively use Facebook credits, and
that Zynga games that use Facebook integration must remain excusive to
Facebook.
Despite of this collaboration, there is a temptation at Zynga to be more
independent and free from Facebooks bounds. This trend is perfectly
represented by two events. The first one was the introduction of Zynga on
NASDAQ on December 16, 2011. Originally priced at $10, Zynga shares
reached a price if $14.50 in March 2012 and symbolize the prosperity
Zynga lived at this time. The second event occurred on June 26, 2012
during the annual Zynga Unleashed conference where the company
announced the Zynga With Friends network, across multiple platforms in
order to connect every players of Zynga games.
However, by the end of 2012 the Zyngas earnings were not so good.
Some analysts have questioned the long-term prospects of Zyngas
business model, especially after Zyngas Q2 2012 earnings report failed to
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meet analyst projections for revenue and earnings. As a direct conclusion,

Zynga decided to cut expenses and expand its business into areas such as
licensed board games, online gambling, its own gaming platform, and
mobile game apps. Zynga announced that the company would be laying
off 520 employees, roughly 18 percent of its workforce, and shut down
offices in New York and Los Angeles. By July 2013, Zynga has reportedly
lost nearly half of its user base from the previous year. Consequently,
investors decreased Zynga's valuation by 400 million and Zyngas shares
reached a price of $2.09. In January 2014, the company announced that
the workforce will be reduce by 15% and that many games will be shut
down. After the quitting of the CEO Don Mattrick the Zyngas result are still
not good and the company has to close some data centers and keep
continuing to reduce its workforce. Today with 100 million player each
month and 25 million each day, Zynga still have a strong base of players
but has to improve its business model, the key piece that analysts pointed
out as the main reason of the decline. Zynga appeared to be too
dependent of Facebook, continuing to operate in the same manner and
users continuing to expect the same quality of games. (1) Zynga has to
establish strong customer relationships that allow them to successfully
retain and grow its customer base sustainably, and will fail if the company
focus on the wrong activities or lack access to the right key partners to
create, deliver and capture value long term as did King.com.

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IV/ How to improve the use of

Big Data and the perception of
users toward this point? (few
ideas, developed during the
presentation).
A) Change their Business Model

More human: customer relationships (1)

Focusing on fewer games categories
Reduce employees number
Get into online gambling

B) Technical issues
Going back to Amazon cloud and forgetting physical storage
Or Development of Zynga Cloud, the zCloud, one of the first hybrid
cloud: in this case transfer data from Amazon
Enhancing security
Open platform to developers
Deleting old and useless data: need to develop a process
Use autonomic computing (anticipate problems and auto-repair)
Use lighter algorithms to get faster servers

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