Comment: Culling the mad cows of FarmVille

Iain Thomson

I've acquired a guilty secret over the past few months. Very few friends know about the habit, and it doesn't take up too long in the day, but it's not something I'm proud of. I've been playing FarmVille.

But this Labour Day weekend I've come to the conclusion that it's time to get rid of FarmVille. I'm not alone in this. Data published by Inside Social Gaming suggests that the FarmVille population peaked this spring at around 85 million, and has been falling steadily since. So what's driving people away?

I think a large part of the move is that Zynga, FarmVille's creator, has got a little too clever for its own good. The very tactics that made it such a success in the gaming world have now been exploited to such a degree that they are becoming counterproductive.

It's worth looking at Zynga's strategy when it comes to gaming, because the company managed to monetise the Facebook platform before pretty much anyone else by using social networking techniques to grow. It's a basic design function of the game that players are encouraged to spam each other and non-players with items from the game.

When FarmVille launched the walls of Facebook users bloomed with messages from players looking to be neighbours, sending each other building equipment or livestock. This technique was borrowed from Facebook itself, which garnered a large proportion of its early growth from mail-bombing the address books of users with invitations to join.

Once someone has decided to join FarmVille, this pressure is only increased. It's difficult to harvest a crop without two or three opportunities to spam your friends with bushels or fuel.

Need a bigger farming area? Just pester people to match up with you. Want to build a new stable? You can either ask 50 times for the necessary parts, or you can buy them. And here's where Zynga has showed dark genius.

As Facebook discovered, growing a free service is easy but it's getting the money that keeps the shareholders happy. Zynga was set up with venture capital with the explicit aim of monetising social gaming, and it is doing very well indeed.

The company quickly became notorious for signing up players to monthly services as part of some games, and its boss reportedly admitted to some fairly shady practices, but that phase appears to have passed. However, FarmVille, and other Zynga games, are very good at getting the maximum amount of money out of players.

If you look at the data, it appears that over 80 per cent of FarmVille players spend no money at all. Certainly I went into the game with that as a firm rule. Fun's fun but, as a child of Scots and Yorkshire parents, I'm as tight as they come, and paying for something like this seemed like a mug's game.

It's perfectly possible to play most of Zynga's stable of games without spending a penny. However, the game designers are very good at finding ways to encourage players to part with their cash.

Take the FarmVille Border Collie, for example. You can earn enough to buy this cute little puppy by harvesting a lot of crops but, if you want to feed the dog and avoid it starving, you have to pay real money for the food. I think it was the introduction of this that first started to turn me off the game.

However, it seems that it's a highly effective tactic, since it's been repeated with machinery for which you have to buy fuel, sprays that can mature a crop early but are delivered by an expensive plane, or manufacturing centres that require the purchase of ingredients to use quickly.

None of this is illegal, or even immediately offensive, but over time I got the feeling that, while I might be playing a game, the game was also playing me. Zynga has taken many of the social engineering techniques pioneered in the hacking and cracking community and is applying them to the gaming world.

In computer security, far more systems are successfully broken into using social engineering techniques than by spending days running endless port scans to try and slip past firewalls. It's much easier to slip on a delivery driver's uniform, blag your way into a building and find a computer with a USB drive and AutoRun enabled.

Spam and email-based virus distribution works on the same principles too. In order to get someone to click on a link, you've got to appeal to them. Sex, death and news are by far the most common ways to attract people to links, but anything that works is the mantra. There's some interesting data on how the spamming industry is adopting mainstream marketing techniques to increase sales.

There's a very fine line between social gaming and social engineering, at least the way Zynga and others are doing it. I suspect a lot of users are getting wise to this at last and are starting to drift away from such games.

This doesn't mean that the end is nigh for Zynga. The company is very good at recycling formats to keep people interested, but I suspect many who got sucked into FarmVille will take a break from Zynga's products and do something more useful instead.