LagrangePt

my fingers are tired, and I type for a living -.-

Facebook games blew up at the same time as two other fundamental design concepts: Freemium and Games-As-A-Service.

A lot of innovation was done on how to make those models work, and everyone was copying mechanics from the games that were most successful. Some companies actually understood why those mechanics worked and used them well... some didn't.

2 currencies - 1 can be earned in game easily and can unlock most content. Easy reward to give players. The other could be earned in tiny amounts, and bought in large amounts. The most successful games were fun without the second currency, but made plaeyrs always want it.

various things over time - serve the game in limited bites, and make the player come back for more. this will create a lasting relationship with the customer, which is vital since players very rarely pay anything on the first day they play a freemium game.

require x friends / neighbors - creates artificial virality, where people would get other people to join the game. much cheaper then buying tons of ads.

skipping time for money - again, games do everything they can to make players want that second currency.

stamina - usually called energy mechanic. games that had an energy mechanic made a huge amount more than games that didn't.

Games that didn't have those mechanics didn't make enough money to keep updating, and if a game didn't continue to provide fresh content all the players would leave.

After 1 game is a huge success, everyone else makes a similar game and tries to steal a piece of that pie, and future games try to recreate the initial success.

There was a lot of innovation - early farmville didn't have a lot of those mechanics, they were added in later. We also tried a lot of mechanics that failed and were ignored. However, it was an environment where copying a feature took weeks instead of years, so all the games copied the most successful games.

ethical considerations? absolutely, it's why I quit. A few months ago someone tried to get me to add those mechanics to a real money gambling game, which I refused to do (and convinced the other guy not to pursue either).

re pay to win - the invest and express model is not a game that can be won, so their is no pay to win. Farmville and similar games were about growing and nurturing something, similar to sim city.

Being completely honest, while I didn't like spamming, if you weren't part of our target audience the business people didn't care, and if you didn't like the game invites then you weren't part of our target audience. Facebook eventually cracked down on the spam a lot, which caused Farmville to drop from 30 million users/day to about 23 million.

Design is done by a bunch of people, who then have to justify the designs to the business people at the top. so while there were always arguments for not spamming and not adding negative mechanics, at the end of the day Zynga was in the business of making money, so that's what got put into the games.

I sorta answered this in my previous AMA, but I'll summarize a bit:

Zynga focuses on adding social mechanics to games, not innovating core game mechanics. You could take the original unreal tournament and Doom and say that one copied the other because both are about shooting stuff, while ignoring that UT was focused on shooting other players. Zynga had no shame about copying core game mechanics from other games, but the vast majority of our time was spent trying to come up with new features to add into games after release, and a lot of those were actually innovative.

TL;DR: Zygna ripped off core game mechanics and added tons of their own features and systems to them. As far as I can tell, this is standard practice in the games industry, though usually companies try to innovate the core gameplay as well. At no time did I witness Zynga trying to straight up clone another game, though I did hear rumors.

I had to work with Cocos2dx (with JS bindings on mobile) and Cocos2dHTML5 for a while after I left zynga.

Overall, HTML5 replacing flash for basic stuff like video and interactive layout is (I feel) a good thing.

OTOH, Creating interesting interactive UI in flash is way easier than any other system I know of, which is a large part of why it's so popular. That hasn't been solved by HTLM5 yet, and it will take a lot of work on the tools before they match up to Flash creation tools in Adobe CS.

HTML5 also has a lot of really annoying parts when you have to accommodate older browsers, and sometimes it's actually faster to use heavily abused DOM rendering rather than using Canvas rendering (which makes for headache inducing sessions of trying to optimize your shared code for DOM on some browsers and Canvas on others). Having webGL isn't reliable yet, which means that a lot of things that are easy in flash are hard in html5.

HTML5 also suffers a lot of the problems that flash has, like really horrible perf gotchas that non-senior devs won't know to avoid. The browser makers are putting in a ton of effort to make HTML5 run fast, but even heavily optimized html5 code seems to have a lower overall performance than decently optimized flash code.