ZYNGA

The NY Times article deals with the growing attention that Zynga and its founder Mark Pincus are recieveing, he is the creator of the company and they have made such games as Farmville and mafia wars and Frontierville. the article goes into details about why he created the company and what his intentions were. Once the company was created the popularity of the games grew greatly. the article then goes on to talk about what Pincus plans on doing in the future with Zynga and where he wants his company to be.
I found it very intersting where the article talks about some of the struggles that the games and company ran into. One of the biggest problems erupted because of the constatnt updating that takes place on useres status's whenever they complete a task. This lead to the facebook community creating a group called "I dont care about your farm, or your fish, or your park, or your mafia!!" I found this portion of the article to be comical in a sense, because i can remember times when it seemed like a majority of my friends and family on facebook were constantly sending updates or invites to these games and it was so annoying. It actually often lead to me not wanting to be on facebook. It was very similar to the spam on myspace that lead to its downfall, luckily these updates and invites stopped.
The other article from the NY times titled "Virtual goods start bringing real paydays," talked about how virtual goods were popular within Asia for years and now they are becoming very popular within the US due to people playing on their mobile devices. The article then discusses the great revenue that these games are creating for their companies. I found it particularly interesting when the article discussed the strategies that are used by these companies to make users pay money while playing these games, we often as players dont think about these tactics and its strange to think that we may be manipulated to pay money.
Lastly i took the chance to play the game farmville on facebook, and i can say that my experience was decent. At first i was confused because i had never played the game and it was a bit diffucult to figure out exactly what the point of the game was. Overall i feel that game isnt very interesting and i really cant see myself playing it unless i was painfully bored and had no other options. Overall i can see why people play the game but its just not my type.

Where do you see these social network games going in future? will they die out or remain poular?