Zynga's Texas Holdem Poker: Five Reasons Why It Succeeds Despite Conventional Wisdom

Zynga's Texas Holdem Poker has always astonished me, it defies the conventional wisdom that real-time games can't succeed on Facebook. Also, amazing to me is that in less than a year, we've already developed conventional wisdom about games on a brand new platform. But I digress...

So why does Texas Holdem Poker succeed where all other real-time games fail? Here's five reasons.

1. You don't need your friends to have fun. It sounds counterintuitive, but if you need your friends playing with you to have fun, then you need them to be online. Most friends are not available to play games whenever you feel like playing. It's the core problem of real-time games. Online poker, however, is nearly as fun to play against strangers as it is with friends.

2. People normally play online poker with strangers. Not only do you not need your friends to play with you, but you wouldn't even expect to play with friends. People having been playing online poker against strangers for years, it's the rule, rather than the exception.

3. Critical mass. Zynga launched Texas Holdem Poker during the those hazy golden days when Facebook first opened the platform. You know, back when people still responded to invites. The early launch combined with the acumen of Zynga's CEO Mark Pincus allowed Texas Holdem Poker to acquire a massive userbase fast. As a result, there was (and is) always someone to play with, which is the key to have a successful real-time game.

4. It doesn't require direct communication between players. Playing online poker with strangers doesn't require you to directly interact with the other players. It's possible, but not necessary. As a result, people can treat it like a single-player game. And believe me, not everyone likes to interact with people, especially with strangers.

5. It's bottable. Meaning that you can have bots as players without the other players knowing. Bots ensure that there is always someone with whom to play. For the record, I'm not saying Zynga uses bots, especially not now that they've reached critical mass, but it would have helped them in the past had they chose to use them. I want to be clear here because when it comes to online poker, bots are a HUGE no-no, and I don't want to paint Zynga with that brush.

Conclusion: In my mind, Texas Holdem represents the opposite of the design principles that people (including myself) are espousing as necessary to have a successful social game.

You don't need your friends. The social graph is unnecessary. It's real-time. Communication is optional. It's essentially a single player experience.

Further evidence that nobody really know what games are going to work on Facebook. It's still a brave new world, kids.

Games Industry Stock Tracker

I added a games industry stock tracker widget to my blog. I was inspired to do this by the new games industry stock tracker at GigaGamez, which I didn't care for. GigaGamez's stock tracker included a bunch of companies whose core businesses were not games. For example, they include Sony, Microsoft, and Time Warner in their tracker. The games division in each of these companies is minor compared to their larger businesses. If you're looking for trends, it seems to me that a tracker that includes only pureplay games companies will be more useful. so that's what I created. Unfortunately, I had to leave Nintendo out because it trades over-the-counter(OTC) and the Yahoo! Finance widget doesn't track OTC, yet.

My tracker includes:

Electronic Arts(ERTS) the giant games publisher.
Take2 Interactive(TTWO), the publisher of Grand Theft Auto, among other titles.
THQ(THQI), another large publisher
Shanda(SNDA), a huge operator of MMOs in China.
The9(NCTY), another operator of MMOs in China, especially World of Warcraft.
Gamestop(GME), the largest US games retailer, which also owns the EBGames retail chain.
Atari(ATAR), a subsidiary of Infogrames, a French games company.

Obviously, there are a lot of important games companies missing, but that's because either they are owned by a giant conglomerate, as Blizzard is owned by Vivendi; or they are privately held companies. Or I just forgot to include them. If so, let me know.

Track the Release of New Games via GigaGamez

For what John and I are doing, it helps to keep abreast of game industry trends. Generally, I rely on Gamasutra and GameDaily Biz News to keep me up-to-date. Often times, I find the amount of information that provide me to be a little much.

So I really appreciate GigaGamez summarizing the new game releases coming out for the quarter in one or two digestible articles. At the moment they don't appear to be covering new casual game releases, which is fine, because there is at least one casual game a day being released, and since they are mostly clones of existing titles, I don't think it's important to track.

When it comes to casual games, it is more informative to track the best sellers, and game-sales-charts.com does an amazing job at that.

Anyway, props to Jason McMaster over at GigaGamez and James C. Smith over at game-sales-charts.com for consolidating this info for lazy bastards like me.