in 2007, a group of tech entrepreneurs developed a plan to launch their game studio Zynga (named after the pet bulldog of one of the co-founders), they opted for a then-novel – and undoubtedly risky – approach to game distribution and marketing. Rather than publishing on an existing gaming platform, such as Steam or the Nintendo Wii, they opted for Facebook. It was a bold move at the time: the social network’s userbase was still relatively small, and most end-users accessed the platform via desktops, rather than through mobile devices. But the founders seemed to sense the platform’s vast potential. More importantly, and crucial for Zynga’s success, Facebook had just launched the Facebook Development Platform, which provided outside companies with “deep integration” to “build a business around your Facebook application” (Nieborg & Helmond, 2019). In practice, this meant that external developers, such as Zynga, could access part of Facebook’s data infrastructure to build “social applications,” which were then accessible within the boundaries of the Facebook.com domain. One of those social applications was Texas Hold’em Poker. As one of the very first games to be played on Facebook, Zynga’s poker game marked the beginning of a new game format: the social game (Kerr, 2017).
By building its business around Facebook, Zynga was able to capitalize on the platform’s rapid growth, while exploiting the social relations among its users and, more pointedly, its ability to collect user data (Bodle, 2011). Here, it seems important to note that Facebook’s expansion followed an exponential growth curve – from 1 million end-users (2004), to 10 million (2006), to 100 million (2008), to more than 2 billion (2017). Two years after the initial success of its poker game, Zynga launched FarmVille – a farming-simulation game that at its peak counted more than 80 million monthly players. What made FarmVille such a blockbuster hit can be largely ascribed to the game’s accessibility: its rules are relatively straightforward, and playing it involves little skill other than logging in from time to time to attend one’s virtual farm. Heeding Facebook’s call, Zynga did indeed deeply integrate the game with the platform’s data infrastructure and social affordances. FarmVille players were not only continuously prompted to play alongside their Facebook friends, but they also could advance in the game much faster by recruiting new friends. Together with constant notifications about a player’s in-game progress, these requests to join the game were publicly shared on their News Feeds. Though the consistent stream of game updates annoyed Facebook users en masse, such communication served as a powerful publicity mechanism that assuredly enticed new players to join. And, crucially, Zynga didn’t contribute a single cent to this marketing blitz.
By integrating its technology and aligning its business model with Facebook, Zynga helped popularize the “freemium” business model for social games. Rather than opting for a premium revenue model – charging players a one-time access fee – the game developer generated revenue through a mix of advertising and optional in-game payments or “microtransactions” (Nieborg, 2015). As FarmVille was a freemium game, players could spend real money to buy exclusive virtual items to decorate their farms. Piggybacking on Facebook’s massive data-gathering efforts, Zynga started to conduct a large-scale data-mining operation of its own – not only to optimize gameplay but also to figure out which players were willing to pay (Arsenault, 2017; Willson & Leaver, 2015).1 Zynga’s “intensely formalized” approach to game design – a commercially oriented and hyper-rationalized mode of data-driven game production (Keogh, 2019) – coupled with aggressive spamming tactics through Facebook’s News Feed, did not make Zynga popular among industry insiders (Victor, 2020). But Zynga executives seemed not to care. After all, only four years after the company was founded, Zynga secured a coveted spot on the Nasdaq stock exchange.
While the motivation to tap into Facebook’s userbase and its rich pool of user data makes Zynga’s position clear, the boon to Facebook is perhaps less obvious. What, then, was in this business partnership for Facebook? One answer is simply capital. At a crucial time in Facebook’s quest for market dominance, Zynga supplied hard cash.2 Equally important, Zynga’s games generated traffic to Facebook and increased the time that users spent on the site. To make sure their crops did not wither, FarmVille players were constantly nudged to come to the platform at regular intervals (Burroughs, 2014). Initially, Zynga’s aggressiveness was the perfect match for an equally megalomaniacal Facebook.
Zynga’s rise and fall
As we will see, this is not where Zynga’s story ends. For platform operators like Facebook, to grow their platform they need to forge and sustain relationships with both end-users and external developers, or “complementors.” This process of constant change and adaptation is referred to as “platform evolution” (Helmond et al., 2019; Tiwana, 2014). As Zynga became increasingly popular, Facebook users grew less and less tolerant of the annoying FarmVille notifications. To appease them, in 2010 the social network started to limit Zynga’s ability to post content on the News Feed. And in 2012, Facebook de-friended the game developer by severing its “special relationship”; suddenly – to extend the platform’s relationship metaphor – Zynga’s status was “complicated.” The game studio’s stock peaked briefly in 2012 and subsequently declined. It took until the summer of 2020 to get back to its debut share price of US$10.
At some point, every game studio – big and small, old and new – confronts a strategic dilemma similar to that faced by Zynga: whether to latch onto an existing game platform or join a new one.3 As noted in Chapter 1, games are prototypical platform-dependent media: game publishers must choose one or more platforms on which to publish their games. Just as Facebook was going through a phase of rapid growth, the platform opened itself up to cultural producers, providing an ideal opportunity for a start-up like Zynga to break with numerous genre and business model conventions. While providing colorful and accessible gameplay to tens of millions, the company helped to conceal its business logic, namely a highly orchestrated system of “data collection, aggregation, analytics, and monetisation of player activity” (Willson & Leaver, 2015: 155). Indeed, because Facebook granted Zynga access to its Social Graph – its vast trove of user data – the game studio was among the first to adopt such an intensely formalized, data-driven approach to game design.
For news organizations, meanwhile, the decision to “join” a platform such as Facebook has been more fraught (van Dijck et al., 2018; Nielsen & Ganter, 2018). That is, given Facebook’s global reach, news organizations likely feel compelled to distribute and monetize content through the platform. Yet, joining Facebook makes them instantly dependent on the platform’s moderation practices, curating algorithms, and revenue-sharing schemes. As Facebook and other platforms frequently change these features in response to shifts in user engagement, advertiser interests, or societal concerns, it is risky for news organizations to bet their business on platforms (Myllylahti, 2018), let alone on one platform in particular. For this reason, in May 2016 many newspapers expressed frustration when Facebook launched its Instant Articles feature. To keep users immersed in the platform, this new “product” hosted newspaper articles on Facebook’s servers and displayed them in users’ News Feeds. Facebook’s pitch to news organizations was unequivocal: they would receive a share of the revenue generated from ads that appeared alongside the content. In exchange, news providers had to relinquish control as Instant Articles granted Facebook jurisdiction over advertising rates, content visibility, and access to end-user data. In this sense, Facebook’s new product threatened to replace the distribution and monetization framework of news organizations, while thwarting the latter’s attempts to recruit new subscribers. When, after years of experiments, it became clear that this new revenue stream turned out to be rather meager, news organizations quickly lost interest or withdrew altogether (Rashidian et al., 2019).
Similar to news organizations, creators in the social media industries – think of influencers, streamers, and casters – rely on various business models to earn income (Abidin, 2016; Duffy, 2017; Postigo, 2016). When it comes to reaching an audience, creators are typically dependent on one specific platform – especially when they first launch their channels or accounts. But from a business perspective, they participate