Zynga Consulting
One of the really neat things about the online gaming world is that people you meet and build friendships with in one company, will often move companies over their careers and those personal relationships move with them. This trend in the industry has allowed The Syndicate to offer it's unique brand of help to a much wider array of companies over time. We have worked not only with MMOs but also with FPS and RTS companies and web-gaming companies. Zynga is one of those web-gaming companies. You probably know them from their vast collection of Facebook and Myspace games that people on your friends list are constantly inviting you to participate in. One of our friends changed jobs and began working for them. That led to an opportunity to do some internal Syndicate focus group work about those games. One of the primary concerns was while the games are very fun and grab your attention quickly, they often do not retain players for long periods of time. While there are exceptions, many players enjoy them for a few weeks and then do not return again. Regardless of the way in which you play a game, there is significant time and money invested in building in so having high churn of players is not a positive thing. So the focus group's feedback delved deeply into why those games work so great to begin with and what features players like and then focused even more so on what doesn't work, what features are missing and what sort of environment would be condusive to forming a guild for those games or to play those games with your guild.

One of the first games that came out following that feedback was Guild of Heroes which clearly began to take steps towards addressing the core issues many players had with web games. First, it was more involved and took longer to burn through the content. Second, it was more visual and not just text based yet could still be played on the web and from work. Third, there was more to building your community than just a count of members that let you do more quests. There was still a ways to go before those games came on par with traditional MMOs but Guild of Heroes was a good step forward.