The big success stories - Facebook, Zynga and Twitter - are leading to investing in ideas on a napkin, because no one wants to miss out on the next big thing.
Companies with aspirations to be larger publishers - Kabam, Kixeye, even Zynga - are moving aggressively off the Facebook platform to mobile and the open Web. Publishers aren't convinced that the costs of being on Facebook are worth it.
These are tough games to play. We shared the puck and we wanted everyone to get a chance to score. Tough games to play in. We want close games. That is why we train so hard. We want to show our fans some even games.
Facebook didn't know how successful Zynga would be.
We've only made three investments: Facebook, Groupon, and Zynga.
Social networks do best when they tap into one of the seven deadly sins. Facebook is ego. Zynga is sloth. LinkedIn is greed.
What you do in film and television is really different than what you do in video games. There have been pockets of success, like at Time Warner. And Disney, with Club Penguin and Facebook games, has done a real good job of recognizing the business is not just about packaged goods.
There's going to be a Google or a Facebook or a Zynga every three to five years. Those are really big ideas that do return substantial amounts of money.
They should just open lots of YouTube schools... as well as, like, a games school, where you can play all types of games. Like, if you want to play racing games, you go there and become a pro at that. Same for football or a shoot 'em up.
Since when do we even play games?” “Since when don’t we play games? Games of life, games of death. Games of love, of hope, of chance, of despair, and of all the myriad wonders in between.” I rolled my eyes at the newcomer. “Hello, Carter.
MySpace is like a bar, Facebook is like the BBQ you have in your back yard with friends and family, play games, share pictures. Facebook is much better for sharing than MySpace. LinkedIn is the office, how you stay up to date, solve professional problems.
If you were building a real-time game like one of Zynga's games, the WordPress model wouldn't work well for that.
I think one thing that may have happened with both Facebook and Zynga is that they may have waited too long to go public. They got particularly cute on that front.
In my estimation, there are four kinds of people that live on this earth: average, good, great, and phenomenal. Phenomenal is like Mother Theresa. She's dead, but we still talk about her on a regular basis. That's phenomenal.
I'm not a competitive player at all, but I don't want competitive games to go away, because for some people that's why they play games, to compete.
If you ask me can you explain the success of Facebook or Twitter, its very simple. People want to have the right to speak, people want the right to say what they feel. They don't want to wait for the question to be asked, they want to say before asking the question, they want to say everything that they feel.