Casual gaming giant unlikely to make the move to consoles; XBLA too 'small'
Xbox Live is widely regarded as the leading light of online console networks. So what does it say when the leading casual games developer Zynga dismisses it as small beans for games as popular as its own?
"Xbox Live's too small a demographic," chief game designer Brian Reynolds told Industry Gamers. "Think about, of my friends, how many of them own an Xbox 360?
"I'm a game developer and I even come from a triple-A space so we might even be in the double digits. 20 or maybe even 30 per cent of my friends might have an Xbox 360, but effectively 100 per cent of them have Facebook and effectively 100 per cent of them have a mobile phone. Of them, probably 90 per cent have a smartphone."
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Yes, but of those 20 percent, maybe 5 will buy the game. They all pay for it.
On Facebook, nobody pays for it, maybe 2 percent and even that is a very low amount.
Zynga just aren't good enough to compete on XBLA. It's very easy to belittle a market, you're not good enough to succeed in. Being successful at free-to-play, is a different ballgame to pay-to-play.
They're quite right. Comparatively speaking, XBLA/PSN is quite small, and since Zynga's business model is entirely reliant on mega-mass market, moving their games to XBLA/PSN wouldn't make any sense at all.
... they also likely wouldn't compete, since the market that plays Zynga games and the market that uses XBLA/PSN has very little crossover, but really, that's beside the point.
They want to be the McDonald's of the gaming world. Simple, cheap games cranked out as quickly as possible and with little regard to quality. They are meant to be consumed quickly with little investment in thought or effort on the consumer side.
They most certainly don't want to go somewhere that they will be compared to products with far more depth that were created with intense care and effort- even if they demand more time and effort for the user to embrace.
The difference is, the end user can actually be convinced to pay for McDonald's hamburgers and XBox games... Zynga games? Not so much. A hundred million Facebook customers may give it a play but the conversion rate will be so low that they may never become profitable.
