Trevor11, what is your take on Farmville, as viable VG platform for ZNGA? Would you consider the new Match-3 puzzle version, just a normal kind of continuing upgrade strategy (or some kind of new 'breakout' of VGing)?
Surely its an attempt to keep a VG long-in-the-tooth as a revenue producer, current.
I doubt ZNGA spent much $$s proportionally (compared to its coming new game line-up funds infusion), in development costs. And, to go a little further, it seems ZNGA should be putting more emphasis on advertisement funding in all media forms? ZNGA seemingly is playing its cards close to its chest, and husbanding funds by media presence rather tilled towards mobile gamers in hopes of catching new play hits.
I do not see much effort towards some kind of educational 'Farm Ville' type of game. For example, California is home base for ZNGA, and western USA (for sure) is experiencing water shortages.
Why not a VG where one has to present their own unique creative approach to solving domestic economic problems like water and food shortages?
This VG might include things like how to design a solar-powered sea water distiller plant, Vertical automated Farming Greenhouses that can produce revolution in urban food sourcing (while creating real new small business possibilities---and hirers), or developing 'water tank RR cars,, to haul water to where it is needed? We citizens and street people need to get focus, and to force change in the Americas at the local and state level.
Forget the slug DC process of progress . . . lets make it happen ourselves with OUR brains and taps. Then, mobile and gamers and desk-toppers can draw together and show the way forward.
All levels and types of schools could use this as class content, and get the students forming work groups around common needs in the wider community.
The type of VG I have envisioned above does not come off as an alienated exercise in tap . . . but a producer of creativity for use in bettering the common, we all live in.
I sure hope ZNGA employees are on this good board and that ZNGA has the sense to monitor our talk also.
I am a firm believer in free enterprise and in that process retail shareholders are not just fish-in-a-barrel, we are citizens of the web economy. Our talk is a form of voting.
E3 coming in June I think . . . anyone down that way . . . could you give us your impressions of ZNGA booth, etc.? Many thanks in advance.