As an operations guy I find this really interesting. What I find interesting is the cost vs revenue of these games.

Obviously to me there is a bunch of up front costs, art assets, game play design, etc. But once you've got the basic HTML5 code going, and the art assets in place, what are your on-going costs?

Clearly there is going to be bandwidth at scale its like $2 - $3 per megabit per month, you've got power/cooling in a colo, so that's going to cost you maybe $3K/month for a 42U rack's worth of servers. And presumably you've got a couple of opsen types tending and feeding that rack. But they are split across say 100 racks so 1/100th of their salary/benefits per month, lets call it $160/month [1]. So lets give the game 500Mbits of bandwidth a month (that is 4.3TB of data transfer per day) We can put 20 beefy servers in our 42U rack with 20TB of disk space and 1/2TB of flash in each (we do this at Blekko)So 400TB of disk space and 10TB of flash, and if you wanted 3.8TB of RAM (192GB/server) and 480 threads of execution.

Now I'm making a huge assumption here, and so I'm calling it out, but my assumption is that the "game" is essentially a front end on a database, where player actions become database transactions, and those transactions show up as changes in the game 'world', further those transactions are both shared (everyone in the game can see them) and private (only you see the changes). So a system that is slightly less beefy than our setup (the Sun setup) gets 10M transactions/minute in the TPC-C benchmark [2]. At that level it suggest our stack-o-servers might support 1 - 2M players.

So our monthly cost is on the order of $6,500 and we're hosting say 1.5M players. That means we need to extract something like a half cent per month out of those players in order to pay for running the hardware. For a gross margin of 50% that is about .86 cents.

I may be completely off here somewhere, please point out my math or configuration errors! It seems like one could essentially run a game 'forever' until that average number got too low and then you would have to wind it down, but one wonders about how hard it is get get someone to pay a penny a month.

I did leave out the maintenance (warranty) cost of the servers, a recent quote from a server vendor had 'everything covered, onsite tech' for $175/server/month. So if you wanted to add that in then there would be another $3,500/month to cover.

It looks like a license to print money but clearly there is something here that sucks all that money away. Curious what it is.

[1] That is two ops people with a combined salary/benefit package costing $200K/year or 16K/month which divided by 100 (1/100th of their work) is $160.

[2] http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_perf_results.asp?result...

I started playing farmville over a year ago to learn about what made Zynga so successful. Farmville is the lowest quality game I have ever seen. For a while, every time you loaded the game there was a php array of what looked like debug information echoed to the page just before the game loaded. There were numerous times where I would queue up a bunch of work in the game, only to get a message saying that "Farmville has been enhanced, please refresh to continue". Refreshing the page would mean I have to click on all those trees again. Every time you load the game you need to close about 5 promotional offers attempting to get you to buy farm cash, or invite your friends to play the game. The game employs emotionally manipulative tactics to get people to use farm cash (in game currency you pay for). Every once in a while you will get a pop up with a picture of a sad horse which needs shelter. It will run away if you don't feed him now! There are also a lot of annoying promotions that pop up and you are not given the option dismiss them. The only button provided is "Start now" or "Tell me more...". The game if full of bugs, and occasionally has pop up windows that have no text and empty buttons. I attempted to log in for the first time in 4 months today, and I could not play the game because it lags so bad despite my having a new computer. To be fair my map has all possible spaces filled with lime trees, so that is where the lag comes from.

With these kinds of games I really surprised Zynga didn't provide a more graceful wind down. As the article suggests, there must be HUGE numbers of people with real emotional attachment to their characters/pets, who almost by definition are Zynga's most loyal customers. SURELY a business decision which exclusively hurts those who are stakeholders in the games you produce is, from a long term perspective, just a horrible move for customer loyalty and reputation.

If I'd put 4 years into a pet on Petville, only to have the game basically deleted from under my nose, there is no way I'd ever become involved in anything Zynga does again.

[Disclaimer, I've never actually played any Zynga games, so this is based on second hand conversions/observations]

The article was amazingly sympathetic to Zynga's management. Almost as if... Hmmm... Almost as if... Someone sent them a press release and they reprinted it verbatim in exchange for an exclusive interview or an advertising buy.

>But Zynga’s share price got decimated over the past year.

Well no, not really. I mean, yes, I guess it technically did. Then it got decimated again. And then it got decimated 12 more times.

You know what the right play on Zynga was? Cashing out and putting the money elsewhere. Instead, Zynga is the classic case of thinking that growth is basically infinite and there is unlimited demand. There are a limited number of gamers willing to buy virtual goods on Facebook games, and there is nothing special that Zynga does on mobile that other companies don't do as well or better.

Take the money and run. Now it might be too late.

Any thoughts as to why they didn't sell the titles rather than shuttering them? I'm thinking maybe they share code across games and don't want it in outside hands, or maybe they weren't revenue positive, or perhaps don't want to hand over any portion of their user database to a competitor. Any other ones I am missing?

"Zynga’s share price is down 3.52% to $2.33 from its $10 IPO price a year ago"

???

I'm a big gaming fan, and it seems like they could have explored and expanded the world of casual gaming; but they instead focused on a cash grab.

So, these are virtual pets and what-not, that people have kept "alive" and happy for years, right?

So, is it really that hard to port the player's data in to a stand alone desk top application that at least the character can sort of be preserved in, or more? Perhaps let the open source minded folk perhaps keep "feeding" the application? Or something like that. I would imagine that players would be happy enough to pay a reasonable amount for that. Or perhaps do a data dump for players so that some representation of the character exists.

I kinda think developers should have something like this in mind before they start, especially where kids and money are concerned.

This is really sketch, in my opinion; There are people with hundreds of dollars invested into their facebook game microtransactions. "Take the money and run" to a whole new level...

Of course what Zynga created cannot really be respected as or compared with proper games, but it's still sad that it's gone. How will the Moma put games like Farmville (which are an important piece of history of computers and FaceBook and stock markets) in an exhibition once the servers have been turned off?

Makes one really want to buy Sim City 5 (which will do calcuations in the cloud and not be playable without internet connection). Today EA shut down games like Fifa 2011!

They need to figure out a way to persist these games. Either sell them off, or open source them or something. It makes me rage when companies lock in users to a game and shutdown the servers.

If you're a dev with Flash experience from the PetVille team looking for an opportunity with a much smaller (but profitable) company, please get in touch with me. Remote work ok.

They may be doing this to switch customers to their other titles before a new competitors game comes out

Good.

Time to issue stock buyback to return money to shareholders and shut the company down.

This is really sketch, in my opinion; There are people with hundreds of dollars invested into their facebook game microtransactions. "Take the money and run" to a whole new level...

Ugh, I hate how the mobile TC website divides pages in multiple sub-pages.

Yeah, predictable three ... now four years ago. Zynga and the rest. Can you say bubble burst when FB finally goes down?