Zynga Exec Spills Beans on FarmVille Success

Today Zynga announced that its FarmVille farming sim game had become the largest and fastest-growing social game in history all at once, with more than 11 million daily active users. Since the game's June 19 launch, it has gained over 1 million new players per week.

That's as many players as FarmVille lead designer Mark Skaggs reached with his work in his entire career with Electronic Arts, where he designed strategy games like Command & Conquer and The Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth. Those games all required the contributions of dozens of programmers and designers, while FarmVille is maintained by fifteen people.

"Farmville's going to be a continuing evolution in terms of products and features. Some will come from feedback we get from our players," said Skaggs. "In the traditional game business that I used to work in, we'd have what we called "game engines." Build one, release it, then another game comes along two years later that uses the same technology. It would be kind of a redo. The great thing about social games is we can evolve games week over week rather than year over year."

Skaggs and his team release new virtual items into FarmVille twice a week. New features debut weekly. Skaggs describes feature development as a process where design and testing begins months before a feature might be implemented in a game. Some are driven directly by player feedback, such as the ability to use tractors. Skaggs describes this as a response to players commenting that very large in-game farms ended up requiring too many clicks of a mouse to manage easily. Tractors make it possible to manage more land with fewer clicks.

It's the game's robust schedule of new content, the brightly colored graphics, and what Skaggs describes as "gameplay elements that come from the game industry rather than the social game industry" that drive FarmVille's current levels of success. Skaggs also credits Zynga's viral recruiting and communication methods as helping the game grow more quickly than the many competing farming social games that have debuted on Facebook and other networks in the past few months. He says players come and stay with FarmVille because of the "moments of delight" built into the gameplay.

"One of the really fun and successful features we added is what we call the 'Lonely Cow' feature," said Skaggs. "You can help find it a home, then somebody claims it. You'll get a brown cow instead of the white cow you had before. Then you milk the brown cow and you get chocolate milk! That's a 'moment of delight,' totally unexpected but cool."

Skaggs describes entire families getting into FarmVille once a mother
or child gets hooked through one of the game's "moments of delight." He freely admits that FarmVille has broken every expected rule of the social gaming scene, growing faster than anyone would have thought possible. When asked about whether or not he thinks FarmVille's meteoric growth will be sustainable, Skaggs remains ambitious. If anything, he feels the greatest danger to FarmVille would be assuming the game had grown enough and slacking off on maintaining high levels of service and new content.

"We're kind of breaking new ground here," said Skaggs. "If you'd said two or three months ago, "Can you make a new social app and have over 10 million DAUs in two months?," we would've said 'No, that's crazy.' But I think we have a good shot at breaking some more records."

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