After playing Mafia Wars, I would Never invest with Zynga

I have been playing games made by Zynga for a couple of years on Facebook. Their games are a fun way to interact with my friends and meet new people online. The first game that I started playing was Café World. I could log into the game, do my daily tasks and log out. This allowed me to add some new Facebook contacts without spending all of my time playing an online game.

The Café World experience wasn’t too bad. I did not see much risk at becoming addicted to the game, and I was meeting new people. After I played Café World for a couple months the game became more and more demanding. New missions came out, more clutter filled the restaurants and the game started overheating my laptop. The final straw for me came when Zynga started setting up the screen so that I would accidently “buy” items with Café Cash. Café Cash is virtual dollars that Zynga gives to their players on occasion, but it is more commonly obtained by players by purchasing the virtual dollars with real dollars.

I thought that this practice of strategically locating pop ups over the top of the “buy” button was incredibly dishonest and deceptive by Zynga’s game developers. Here is how Zynga got me to spend my Café Cash. A pop up about a new event showed up on the screen when I logged in like in the picture to the right. I just wanted this pop up to go away so that I could get to the game, so I clicked the OK box on the window. This did not make the pop up go away, so I clicked it 3 or 4 more times. It finally disappeared and I was informed that I purchased a piano with my Café Cash. Luckily I did not buy my Café Cash with real money, but it let me know that Zynga is deceptive. They are more than willing to take advantage of their players

I switched over to playing Mafia Wars by Zynga. I was still meeting people and interacting with friends. Mafia Wars has its own version of Café Cash that they call Reward Points. Zynga pulled the same move in Mafia Wars that they did to me in Café World by locating pop ups directly over the buy buttons. I contacted customer service about this issue, and they told me that they do not refund reward points for accidental purchases.

Zynga is slammed all over the Facebook gaming community for their lack of customer satisfaction. Zynga seems to abandon current players in an effort to appeal to new players. Many of the current players get fed up with the constant spamming of their Facebook's news feeds with new content; game designs that heavily favor money players; and timed missions that cannot be reasonable completed without spending money. A lot of my friends that were daily players have quit playing. Even if these players did not spend money on the game directly, they still brought in their friends to play and drove up ad revenue for Zynga’s platform deals.

While Zynga may look good on paper, the fact remains that the treatment of their customers and deceptive practices will lead to players like me to stop playing. Another issue that I have with Zynga is that I do not trust their numbers when it comes to active users. Zynga recently had a contest where Mafia Wars players voted for a winner. We could all vote more than once for an item that any serious Mafia Wars player would want. I personally voted 15 times and I know some people that voted 40 times. At the end of the event the vote total was 1.6 million. Divide that by 10 to give a reasonable guess of the number of people that played Mafia Wars during that week and you are looking at 160,000 players. This is nowhere close to the 2.1 million monthly users that Mafia Wars claims, or the 18 million that have liked Mafia Wars on Facebook. After experiencing Zynga’s dishonest gaming practices, I view their IPO as one final cash out. They are a company on the decline and I don’t think that more money is going to save them. They don't care about their products or their customers, so no one is going to have any loyalty to their company.

2012 Copyright Michiganman567