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Zynga’s Café World Goes from 0 to 8.6 Million Users in a Week, with Big Implications
October 8th, 2009
| By Eric Eldon | 54 Comments » |
FarmVille broke all sorts of records as the fastest-growing and largest application on Facebook. But now another Zynga production, Café World, is looking set to best it. The app has grown from 0 to 8.6 million users since it launched a week ago, according to AppData, based on a combination of cross-promotion from other Zynga games (including FarmVille) and advertising on Facebook.
This is especially good for Zynga, as we believe the company could try to go public as soon as next March. Café World has a baked-in revenue model in the form of virtual goods. It’s another big hit using the so-called “Zynga Playbook” for making apps grow, meaning the company can further justify its 2009 financials to public investors. We’ve heard the company is already on track to make $200 million this year.
However, the effect on the overall social gaming developer ecosystem is not so clearly good.
Café World is not a clone of Playfish’s Restaurant City, but there are many similarities — like the fact that both are virtual restaurant games, where users create restaurants, cook and sell virtual food, etc…. Specific similarities include: The layout of the restaurants, the view of the street on the side, the design and animation of characters — especially walking and eating. See our review of the two games for more on that. Café World has done some features in a more interesting way, like restaurant expansion.
In context, Restaurant City is currently the eleventh largest application on Facebook, with 16.2 million monthly active users. It is one of the company’s crown jewels, the other big one being Pet Society, at number 6 with 19.5 million monthly active users. The company is the second largest developer on Facebook, with 56.9 million monthly active users. But Zynga is the largest with 140 million, if you add up all of its applications (note: this number is not de-duplicated).
To get a sense for what Café World means for Restaurant City, take a look at what happened to Slashkey’s Farm Town before and after Zynga launched FarmVille in June. As FarmVille grew, Farm Town’s traffic leveled off, even though it is staying steady with nearly 19 million monthly active users. The same may be happening for Restaurant City, as its traffic has also leveled off in the last week. Although none of those stories have been fully told — Playfish’s Country Story, also a virtual farming game, is smaller but is still managing to grow. It has more than doubled in the last 90 days, from 3.15 million to 7.34 million monthly actives.
What Zynga is showing is that it is willing to copy, then innovate on high-quality games perfected by others, and use its market size, cash, and optimization techniques to do that. Its cross-promotion efforts include strategically placed buttons for Café World in other games, including hits like FarmVille, Mafia Wars, YoVille and more. In terms of money, we’ve heard from multiple sources that Zynga is spending $50 million on Facebook ads this year. Meanwhile, Zynga isn’t just coming out with quality new games. It keeps pumping out new versions of existing games, like its recent expansions of Mafia Wars.
For any company that develops a game that gets traction, Zynga has the ability to come in and do it better.
It is not clear what any other developer can do to stop this, besides find more effective ways to build and market their own apps. While Zynga is sometimes busted for things like spammy invites, many other developers have been or actively are guilty of the same. Perhaps a group of VCs or a private equity firm will step in with $100 million, roll up some of the smaller yet successful developer shops, and go to war? Perhaps more established gaming companies will make acquisitions and devote more resources to social gaming? Yesterday, casual game company PopCap raised $22.5 million in a large part to push its social gaming effort faster — this is after ten years of the company growing to 240 employees without ever taking a round. And it was not surprising to hear, earlier this week, that another large rival, Playdom, is looking to raise more money.
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October 8th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
[...] e crescimento dos jogos Zynga para o mercado como um todo. Acessem o artigo original e completo em http://www.insidesocialgames.com/2009/10/08/zyngas-cafe-world-goes-from-0-to-8-6-million-users-in-a-... Compartilhe e [...]
October 8th, 2009 at 12:18 pm
me and like over 100k users would like to know what the HECK happened to the app TRIUMPH!!!!!!!
October 8th, 2009 at 2:35 pm
I have food on the stove that has taken quite a while to cook. It will surely spoli before this problem will be fixed. It takes a long time to make some of those dishes. I won’t be so willing to invest that play time on this game again.
October 8th, 2009 at 6:28 pm
There’s no denying that Zynga has managed to create a clever commercial engine for their games and a vast amount of userbase as a result. There’s also no denying that this has occured largely on the basis of pretty predatory tactics in terms of development. Their own forays into original development did not go too well after all (as Mark Pincus boasted a while ago at GDC, killing a fantasy RPG title that cost $2m to develop etc).
However there are two important things to note here:
1. The Curve
There’s profit all along the curve. To get to such vast numbers, Zynga has had to spend big. What I find very interesting is those 19m users sitting in Farm Town, those 56m users sitting in Playfish’s games. Those numbers have been achieved without spending on vast marketing budgets.
Zynga may have 140m users (possibly, as noted above, many recycled into several games rather than a ‘natural audience’). But I think the stickiness of those user numbers are considerably softer.
More importantly, there’s little evidence to suggest that just because Zynga has such large numbers that this is a problem for anyone else. Social games are distributed to such a vast audience that they are not really a zero-sum game in the way that the console gaming industry is. In that way it kind of doesn’t matter what Zynga is doing.
2. The Games.
With due respect, many of the source games of Zynga’s hits are not particularly innovative or complex games as such. They are easy targets. Maybe that’s picking a fight but I think it is time to acknowledge openly that titles like Restaurant City, Farm Town and Mobsters are pretty thin simulators which, while holding the public interest because of their innately casual underpinnings, are not exactly great experiences.
They are simplistic as games, and this is what makes them clone-able. It does not take a great deal of time to design a restaurant simulation game when that simulation does not bother attaching any game effects to the individual virtual goods, for example. Nor does it really stretch the brain to design a leveling system for a role playing game when that game’s entire mechanic is a really simple “Do Job” unlock mechanism.
Zynga (or Playdom, Playfish, SGN, anyone really) copies these games because it takes their developers mere weeks or a couple of months at best to do so. Social games are, so far, incredibly dumb software.
There are many lessons to be learned from the early days of Atari, in fact. In the days of Pong and whatnot, Atari used to get very annoyed by all the versions of Pong that used to appear. Popcap found a similar situation when Bejewelled was cloned by absolutely every casual developer out there. Many games have suffered from a similar level of easy copying and there isn’t really any magic to it at all. Game cloning has a very long and ignoble history.
The kinds of games that don’t get successfully cloned are complex ones. Will Wright’s Sims games have never been successfully cloned because they are actually quite complicated. The game mechanics are not immediately apparent, the rule resolutions likewise, and so it would take the average copy-and-paste developer way too long to figure it out. World of Warcraft has never been cloned. Competed with certainly but not carbon copied. It’s too complex.
The secret, therefore, to protect yourself from Zynga and Zynga-esque tactics from other companies is simple: Make great games that they can’t reverse-engineer in a week.
As a side note I think the recently touted “Zynga Playbook” stuff is highly overrated. A lot of bloggers like to puzzle over it and make out like there is some mystery or secret sauce to how Zynga operate. There isn’t. Their model is incredibly simple.
All Zynga are doing is applying a funnel marketing model, directing users from one game to another. Playfish do exactly the same thing with that big sidebar they have in all of their games. A funnel strategy is as simple as ‘Copy Game X, apply advertising budget up the wahzoo, rinse and repeat’. It’s television thinking.
And it’s a perfectly solid way to operate a business. Television rewards mass consumerism and Zynga and the others are all looking to gain those vast numbers. So they apply the model and spend their warchests and generate users. Just like NBC and CBS.
But
At some point a segment of the social gaming audience is going to tire of thinness. Unlike the TV audience they are always vulnerable to being poached via the infinite channels effect. Unlike the TV audience they are also very young, very naive and in many cases very new to the platform. Many Facebook gamers are like people who just bought their first TVs, and so are impressed with anything shiny.
Game depth, complex original ideas and more fringe/niche games that command greater loyalty through originality are starting to seep through. Those games are by far the most interesting future experiences and they are the ones that will ultimately drive the most value. I don’t just say this as a developer (which I am, working on Spell Souls which aims to be one of those games) but as an observer and student of how game markets rise and fall. The Zynga / Playfish / Playdom TV model is very vulnerable because it is based on thin games, and many higher-monetising game players inevitably gravitate toward more depth, specialisation and niche interest. They don’t tend to settle for thin-ness indefinitely.
I think that the next step for the top social game companies, as a result, is a combination of serious RnD to get some quality games under their wing combined with a round of acquisition. Zynga has built themselves a presence, as has Playfish etc, and those are qualities that existing game publishers like EA and Activision are going to want to snap up regardless of whether they understand or know what to do with them. I expect therefore that Zynga and the other companies will to snapped up within 12-18 months (if they have any sense).
October 9th, 2009 at 3:48 am
Great comment Tadhg, I completely agree, the games as they are simple and faddy and will pass. Sony have launched a version of Buzz which is one of their more social games, but I think the games are so simplistic at the moment the big developers would rather build than buy
October 9th, 2009 at 12:10 pm
[...] mode for the burgeoning titles on Facebook (most recent crazy example, Zynga’s Cafe World, which has reached over 8m users in one week). You cannot separate this success from the fact that your gaming is public [...]
October 9th, 2009 at 2:21 pm
[...] This trend continued this week as Zynga looks on track to beat records for fastest growing Facebook app. Cafe World has climbed from 0 users to a whopping 8.6 million users in just a week according to Appsdata. This overshadows even Farmville’s growth and sets Cafe World well on the path to claiming the top spot. The game is also creating speculation as to its effect on Playfish’s Restaurant City. Restaurant city is currently the 11th largest Facebook app and it will be interesting to see if Zyngas latest title will put a damper on its growth. The release of Farmville had the effect of stopping the growth of Slashkey’s Farm Town. This raises several questions: Will Zynga do the same to Playfish? How loyal are players to the brand of game? How far can the numbers of users grow with this apparent lack of innovation? [...]
October 9th, 2009 at 2:58 pm
[...] mode for the burgeoning titles on Facebook (most recent crazy example, Zynga’s Cafe World, which has reached over 8m users in one week). You cannot separate this success from the fact that your gaming is public [...]
October 10th, 2009 at 11:51 pm
[...] Zynga’s Café World Goes from 0 to 8.6 Million Users in a Week, with Big Implications - intressant analys om zynga och hur de lanserar sina facebookspel. [...]
October 11th, 2009 at 9:39 am
[...] How did Zynga do it? Cross-promotion. They linked Café World through FarmVille, a game that already has 56 million users according to AppData. Zynga has been making money by selling virtual goods in their games. Zynga will be making about $200 million in revenues this year alone according to Eric Eldon of Inside Social Games. [...]
October 12th, 2009 at 1:37 am
Spelet segar jättemycket
October 12th, 2009 at 8:02 am
[...] story of last week on Facebook’s platform was the growth of Zynga’s Café World social game, and it easily took the number on spot on our list of the top 20 fastest-growing apps. It launched [...]
October 12th, 2009 at 1:36 pm
[...] Read the full story on Insidesocialgames :Zynga’s Café World Goes from 0 to 8.6 Million Users in a Week, with Big Implications [...]
October 12th, 2009 at 7:48 pm
[...] of Café World, a restaurant simulation that directly challenges Playfish’s Restaurant City. Café World grew by 10 million users in a week, through Zynga’s methods of cross-promotion with its other [...]
October 13th, 2009 at 8:02 am
[...] simulation game FarmVille to more than 56 million and restaurant simulation game Café World to more than 10 million users in the week since it [...]
October 14th, 2009 at 1:02 am
[...] Cafe World has succeeded thanks to a combination of cross-promotion from other Zynga games (including FarmVille) and advertising on Facebook, according to my former colleague Eric Eldon at Inside Social Games. [...]
October 14th, 2009 at 5:25 am
[...] story of last week on Facebook’s platform was the growth of Zynga’s Café World social game, and it easily took the number on spot on our list of the top 20 fastest-growing apps. It launched [...]
October 19th, 2009 at 3:52 pm
would be good if i could get on it
October 19th, 2009 at 8:37 pm
Numbers should/will drop if fans can’t play it!! The application has not been responding for a couple of days.
October 20th, 2009 at 4:13 am
There are many cheats in Cafe World who can get a ridiculous number of stoves. Zynga is also not responding to reports on cheats.
October 20th, 2009 at 6:50 pm
love the zynga games. have lots of fun
October 21st, 2009 at 10:53 pm
Cafe World is great if you can get on and play. It’s been very choppy the last couple of days and it’s difficult to play. I’m sure it has to do with how many users you have gotten and I’m sure your site can’t hold all of us. I have my meals on the stoves that are ready RIGHT NOW that I have been waiting for for 24 hours and now I cannot get onto the site. I hope my food does not spoil =O
It’s a fun little game and it’s a great stress reliever. I think you should have more 6, 8 & 12 hour cooking times versus the 1 day time. Good luck with your site and I’ll buy stocks as soon as I can!!
October 22nd, 2009 at 12:40 am
The game isnt allowing me to get on it atm.. I have 2 Chickens, a pot roast and 2 vamp steaks ready to put on the counter and they are going to spoil… this is not good at all, anyone know why?
USMC Recruit Stufflebean
Nov. 2, 2009 date for Boot leave
Semper Fi
October 22nd, 2009 at 12:55 am
since Zynga is popular in creating virtual games, why not create or come up with a mall, supermarket or/and grocery shop game something like expanding your store thru leveling, think thats one good idea since i am a zynga game patronizer. Thanks
October 22nd, 2009 at 1:12 am
I am considering to quit this game while I was going to like it.
They have servers problem, so sometimes I couldn’t login and lost my dishes & time. e.g. I cooked a chicken for 24 hours and planned to serve it this afternoon, but I lost it coz’ I couldn’t login as the servers problem. Don’t want to waste my time on it.
October 22nd, 2009 at 1:44 am
This game cafe world is 100 times better than that crappy farmville!!!! It is so shite!!!!!!!!!! farmville.
October 22nd, 2009 at 10:06 pm
I love Cafe World. I forget my problems when I play every night as soon as I arrived home. I am happy with it. Congratulations.
October 25th, 2009 at 4:21 pm
[...] my response after I read a post on Raph Koster’s site (I’m playing feed catch-up) which quote from/linked to this article regarding Zynga’s Cafe [...]
October 27th, 2009 at 5:26 am
Ever since I got to Level 22, Cafe World hasn’t worked properly, my waiters stopped serving, so everyone just walks right out (even through walls). I love the game, it’s my fav in all the zynga games, but it has been driving me crazy! the thing is everyone elses seems to be working , but none of my friends have gotten as far as I have, so I dont know if the problem is with me or with the game.
October 27th, 2009 at 8:50 am
[...] wykresy dot. Cafe World znajdziesz pod tym linkiem, a poniżej kilka restauracji, z którymi [...]
October 27th, 2009 at 8:51 am
[...] wykresy dot. Cafe World znajdziesz pod tym linkiem, a poniżej kilka restauracji, z którymi [...]
October 31st, 2009 at 10:42 am
think a very good game, when i can play,
have a problem very hit and miss loading (on facebook) loads all other games apart from Farmville & cafe world, any advice ?
Regards
Derek
November 2nd, 2009 at 7:33 pm
[...] fact, back in early October, before we heard the DeWolfe rumors, we were speculating who could challenge the current markets leaders. “Perhaps a group of VCs or a private equity [...]
November 3rd, 2009 at 11:35 am
Get all the Cafe World Cheats, Hacks, and Strategies at:
http://cafe-world-cheats-guide.blogspot.com
Learn to get points and coins overnight, gain 20 levels in 3 days, double your Cafe Coins every 8 hours, and much more!
November 4th, 2009 at 8:29 am
[...] games (Café World and Roller Coaster Kingdom) are still coming off their launch highs and hadn’t found a stable sticky factor prior to the news feed change, so it’s hard to [...]
November 6th, 2009 at 11:19 pm
Great game. I found out the best secrets on how to get ahead at http://bit.ly/8sDf2
November 8th, 2009 at 8:59 am
Enjoy the game but really wish they would let us expand the cafe. Ran out of room, have lots of money saved but cannot go any where else with this game until they let me expand.
November 9th, 2009 at 12:21 am
I was on I believe 30 when I when I recieved the stir fry food. When I went to level 31 I recieved the stir fry again. So now I just reached lovel 33 and when I click the point count at the top it shows next level 33 a stove I believe it is a glinch and I am one item behind, :evel 32 I got a counter and it says next lovel 33 is a stove. Well I am on already on level 33 I hope I explained his correctly.
Thanks , Roxane
November 13th, 2009 at 11:27 am
[...] watching to see if the developer could again eclipse records for user growth. The last Zynga hit, Café World launched a little over a month ago, gaining 1.1 million new users on day two and an additional 1.4 million users on day three, [...]
November 16th, 2009 at 9:25 am
It was very fun until I expanded as far as I could and now I am bored. I have lots of points and cannot expand and am sick of not having enough room. I am at level 41 and it is the same thing everyday. Why can they not make expansions available?
November 28th, 2009 at 5:53 am
This is phenomenal.Another hit for Facebook Games.
First with Mafia Wars , then Farmville and here comes another cool game that i like to play , Cafe World.
Let’s play it together.
December 4th, 2009 at 8:07 pm
They’ve added Mac and Cheese (yeah) but it says 1 hr cook time and I bought it at the same time as the tikka masala kabobs which also take one hour and the kabobs were done but the mac and cheese still had 1/2 hr to go : (
December 8th, 2009 at 7:06 am
[...] New to Café World? It is one of many games made by Zynga. The game can only be played on Facebook and you can invite your friends on Facebook. From today the game hs more users than Twitter and the number of users have rapidly increased over a week. Read more about it here! http://www.insidesocialgames.com/2009/10/08/zyngas-cafe-world-goes-from-0-to-8-6-million-users-in-a-... [...]
December 14th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
[...] recent Zynga games have grabbed the headlines this fall — first Café World, then FishVille and most recently PetVille — virtual farming game FarmVille continues to grow [...]
December 14th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
[...] recent Zynga games have grabbed the headlines this fall — first Café World, then FishVille and most recently PetVille — virtual farming game FarmVille continues to grow by [...]
December 31st, 2009 at 10:20 pm
I have been having trouble from day 1 when my ability to share extra food suddenly stopped publishing on my FB page. Now when I try to send gifts and put in 20 names when I hit send the application tells me I haven’t selected any friends yet – how does one get help!!! I can’t find anything that will get this thing working properly. I can’t even leave and start again.
January 4th, 2010 at 10:18 pm
[...] And some more gyaan which includes some stuff about Victoria’s Secret lingerie! The InsideSocialGames article which I talk about can be read here. [...]
February 4th, 2010 at 9:51 pm
Hi again,
Love game; but fix errors!
Please fix the chief’s because they have been suck in place for five days now without moving! I’m loosing customers and pts. I’m way behind because of this; partly.
Thanks!
February 5th, 2010 at 4:48 am
Well it’s all and good to be the most popular online game but now Cafeworld is also known as the buggiest.
Take a look at the forums of zynga and the majority of threads are about glitches, lag and food, counters and objects disappearing. Complaints of bugs abound.
Even now there are known bugs and glitches but their seems to be quite a bit of apathy in zynga developers to fix them. Instead they just put in more and more gimmicks and heaps of nice new items to be bought with real money.
It gives me the imagery of a car that’s hardly working, but has the BEST stereo system around.. ‘your car’s a piece of ___ which won’t drive well but love the stereo and lights in it!”
February 12th, 2010 at 9:48 am
Well said Annie, I just came from the forums and posted a long messege to the developers. On my FB home page today people were commenting about being sick of Cafe World. They now have implemented some new log in page that takes twice as long and for me, I have the largest cafe and all the stoves and counters you can possible get i the game and its just one big flippin lag. Its the owrst game ive ever seen on the internet. Honestly. I dont know how a compnay can continue to get away with it. They put out their to the media they are so great but in fact they are the worst Game developers I have come across today on the internet. The developers do not know how to code properly, especially in the latancy dept of the game. You can turn blue in the face with your Zynga game reports and nothing ever gets done. They have the worst customer service as well.And try and say something that isnt all possitive about the game on the Zynga forums. The head honcho Mod will send you a notification faster then I can say Zynga and delete your post and all you sais was the game stunk and fix it. They have totally put a gag on any bad publicity to there games. I went to Marks blog and said what was on my mind and I got a email from the customer service manager wanting to call me. I was going to do it but then said to myself,”she is only doing this because I went that far”. When I like over 100 reports complaining they didnt care then , why now? Cause I went public outside Zyngas kingdone and FB. Thats why.
February 14th, 2010 at 5:19 am
yes I am having a problem with cafe` world ,it`s too slow and the food disappearing of the counters that I waited hours for the food to cook and the coins, I use to cook the dishes.this is pissing me off then I don`t feel like playing the games, do something about this problem soon. I enjoy playing it like cooking the dishes not when i get pissed off with it.I will stop playing this games
February 18th, 2010 at 11:06 pm
my cafe world zynga on facebook was blocked.can you please help me on how to get it back.i missed playing cafe wolrd.
February 26th, 2010 at 8:08 am
I dont know why you miss it. Its a fact all Zynga games have technical issues daily and THE ONLY REASON THEY ARE MAKING IT IS BECAUSE THEY ARE ON FACEBOOK. If they werent on FB they wouldnt have all these users. Thats a fact! If Zynga had its own place to go and the games were as crappy runned as they are now, Mark would be working at Burger King. They are the worst games Ive ever played.Zynga (Mark) use the FB people as guinea pigs and we let him get away with this. We complain daily of all his games not working and it does no good. How he is getting away with this Illnever know and they make money from dumb people that give it for virtual items. Its time for people to stand up to Zynga and stop giving real cash and maybe they will finially fix there games. They are all in a shambles. Thats a fact because i play Farmville, Petville. Yoville, Cafe World and CW is the worst. I quit Roller Coaster Kingdom because it was real bad like cafe Worls with the latency problem that was not coded correctly and they refuse to change it. People need to ban together and not let Zynga get away from also ripping people off daily. if you read the different forums of the games you will read many complaints of people that have paid cash and not gotten what they paid for 3 months later down the road. How can a company ever get this far. Its idots allowing it and other pay the price. I refuse to every give Mark any of my hard money when I get noting but headach from his games. The only reason why I play is because of my personal situation being home all the time and its pom FB and its something to to do but its gotten to where its just an awful experience daily playing any Zynga game. Now put that on the chart of all of the complaints, and its not just me that has about had it with Zynga. They have an awful service record, their games are always breaking down daily, and to say anything on a Zynga forum that isnt positive without being ugly your still shut down by the Mods. Zynga doesnt like for any negativity to get out. Zynga is one big Negative in my books. And the only reason why I play is because its on FB and I want to stay comnnectd to my firends there and they feel the same way. Its like e have a barrel over our heads really.
March 2nd, 2010 at 7:16 am
I would like to take a brief glance to this “PlayBook” just to see if it deserves all this buzz it is receiving.