The Web is fantastic at many things - e-mail, e-commerce, e-vites, for example. But unless your name is Amazon or Google, making money there has proven elusive.
Brian Reynolds, chief game designer for Zynga, the company that made the social game Farmville, shed a little light on how to get people to buy the farm online at last month's Design Innovate Communicate Entertain Summit in Las Vegas.
To start with, Reynolds threw out some bare-bones data:
•Social games cost between $100,000 to $300,000 to make.
•Between 3 percent and 5 percent of people who play social games pay money for virtual goods in the game or sign up for advertising that generates cash for the developer.
•About 31 million people play Farmville every day.
Now let's suppose that each person who plays a social game generates, on average, a penny a day. Multiply that penny by the number of days in a year, 365, and you get an average of $3.65 generated per year per person.
Multiplied by the number of people who play Farmville every day, that adds up to $113 million.
Not bad for a game that perhaps cost $300,000, maximum, to make.
Reynolds did not disclose how many pennies per day Farmville generates. But if it's a penny, one could conclude that it's a $100 million-a-year game. Perhaps that's why some have valued Zynga as a $3 billion company.
Reynolds, whose credits include Age of Empires 3 and Sid Meier's Civilization II, talked about a couple of tricks Farmville uses to get players to part with their cash.
The first is to sell items that let players differentiate themselves from the crowd (flamingo-shaped topiaries, which need to be purchased, have been especially popular on Farmville).
The second is to let players pay to advance faster in the game - and that is, after all, money.
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