A little over a year ago, a friend suggested I check out a start up company called Zynga because they were looking for people with traditional game experience.

After meeting some of the smartest people I know, I signed up for the adventure.

Today marks my 1 year anniversary at Zynga and it’s fun to take  a moment and look back.

When I started at Zynga, they had just grown from 50 people to 200 in a matter of months. My first assignment was to work with the Guild of Heroes team. After an early test release of the game, I moved on to help with Mafia Wars, Street Racing and Vampires. Those teams significantly grew their daily unique player count dramatically during that quarter. From there, I started a new team and we created FarmVille.

(I’m now VP of Product Development at Zynga, helping new and existing product teams by sharing my experience at creating FarmVille and my background in creating hit games in the traditional game business.)

Personally, I’ve seen some amazing things while working at Zynga.  In the traditional game business, the games I developed sold 16.5mm copies at retail over 15 years.  In 1 year in social games at Zynga, over 60 million people have played one of the games I’ve created (FarmVille). Quite a change.

It’s also the reason I tell people “run, don’t walk” to check out the open positions at Zynga. The place is ripe with opportunities for ambitious, smart and high energy people interested in being part of the birth of a new segment of the gaming industry.

Beyond, all the fun I’ve had working with folks at Zynga, it’s amazing to see how the social games industry has grown, both in terms of the quality of the games created but also maturity as a business. In the last 9 months, the industry has seen the launch of over a dozen games which each now have over a million people playing a day. Zynga alone has launched 4 of them in the last 6 months. FarmVille alone delivered an industry wide impact and has definitively proven that social games can go mainstream.

John Doerr came by Zynga a few weeks ago for a lunch meeting. During that meeting, he shared how Zynga reminded him of the start of other now great companies he’s seen during his time. He also suggested that we cherish the experience while we’re in the middle of it.

After 1 year at Zynga, I thought it might be time to spend a minute doing just that. There’s more stories and experience to share, but I’ll save them for another time.

One of the cool things about creating FarmVille for Zynga is to see all the different places it shows up.

We’ve heard about people playing it during parties, at sporting events, in  bars, etc.

Nokia did a product demo for their new phone and used FarmVille as an example to show off their browser.

Check it out! (time 1:55). FarmVille on Nokia phone.

Couldn’t tell how well it runs, but Nokia certainly knows how to get people’s attention when showing off a phone.

Access FarmVille from Zynga here.

Had a wide ranging conversation with a very smart friend this morning about FarmVille, speaking at conferences, and different leadership styles.

During the conversation, he shared how early game developers used to complain that mistakes by retailers ruined the opportunities for their games to become hits.

Because of FarmVille and my experience making hit PC games for Westwood/EA, an instant set of connections flashed through my mind.

“Selling games at retail is like a glacially slow version of selling games on the internet.”

The thought process unrolled:

1. Selling at retail is a glacially slow versus using the internet.

2. The slowness and “physical-ness” of selling at retail creates it’s own set of problems (shelf space, inventory, cost of goods).

3. Debugging the problems with your product at retail are exacerbated by the problems created by selling at retail. (Do players not like the game or did the retailer forget to put it on the shelf?).

Now about selling social games online.

1. “Instant on”: player sees and clicks a link to your game on Facebook and starts playing instantly with no obligations.

2. If the player likes your game, they keep playing. If not, they quit playing. We know how  as game makers how many people are playing the game each day.

3. Without looking at any personal information, we can know when people stop playing the game and can make daily adjustment to add fun, remove boring parts and fix bugs.

4. When a player spends money in your game, it shows up in your bank account that day.

Seems obvious to me. Hope other people see it too:

Don’t waste another minute selling games at retail.

Seriously…stop it. Right now.

Do you see it too or am I off track?

When I talk about FarmVille, I get the questions “Did you expect it to grow so quickly?” or “Was it hard to scale it up to handle that many people?”.

Simple, answer. Of course… we didn’t expect it to grow so quickly.

We released on June 19th, guessing our day 1 players would add up to a couple of thousand. Turned out to be about 25k. We guessed day 2 would be 50k and it was 100k. Day 3 was over 500k and day 4 was over 1 million.

When the growth started happening, the team just held on and we did the best we could to keep up with it. Fortunately we’re on the Amazon cloud and that helped because with a simple command we could add more servers. Still it wasn’t easy, and there were many late nights and weekends and many challenges that hit us (and still do) because of the sheer size of the player base.

Imagine driving through a big parking lot full of speed bumps. If you drive slowly, no big deal. If you drive fast? Bam, bam, bam…you hit the speed bumps hard and it makes for a bumpy ride.

That’s the best analogy I’ve been able to come up with so far about scaling FarmVille.

It’s a lot of fun with the right mindset.

Have a better analogy? Let me know.

Cool news!

FarmVille is in the lead sentence of today’s USA Today article on Social Gaming!

John Schwartz of USA Today wrote a great article called “For social networks, it’s game on” where he describes how social gaming is transforming the gaming industry.

Great article and lots of fun for me and the team to see FarmVille keep going growing.

BTW – earlier this week, FarmVille cross the 21mm daily unique player mark!

Check out John Schwartz’s USA Today article here.

Check out FarmVille here.

Social games are mainstream.

Here’s why I think so.

According to various sources over 10 million people watch “Oprah” each day. Most people definitely consider “Oprah” mainstream.

Compare Oprah’s 10 million viewers with the 20 million people who play Zynga’s “FarmVille” game each day. Or compare it to the 6.5 million people who play Zynga’s “Mafia Wars” each day. (source: developeranalytics.com).

Doesn’t it seem like social games have hit the mainstream?

Let me know what you think.

See more about Zynga here. Check out FarmVille, Mafia Wars and Cafe World too.

I still feel like I’m catching up to myself.

After working last summer and early fall on two PS3 games as a coder (yes, a coder…my skills were rusty but I was able to keep up), I joined Zynga full time in November.

If you’ve been on Facebook, you probably know Zynga by the games you play. Zynga makes “FarmVille”, “Mafia Wars”, “Yoville”, “Texas Holdem Poker”, “Cafe World” and many more of the most popular games on Facebook.

I worked on a few games and then moved to lead the team that created FarmVille.  I’ll leave the various press articles to share more about FarmVille for those that are interested.

I’m finding the whole social space a very interesting and radically different experience than making, what I now call “traditional games” (PC DVD, XBox 360, PS3, Wii, etc.), for EA.