Madam Jenny's blog: "Madam Jenny's"

By now almost everyone at Facebook has heard about the dispute between Zynga and Facebook. First Zynga threatens to leave Facebook because they think a 30% commission to Facebook is too much. Facebook wants Zynga to keep all of their games only at Facebook.

I will admit I do like Farmville, Mafia Wars and Poker Blitz (when it is working). However I do not know if I am willing to log into Zynga every day in order to play my games. I am a member of Pogo and I do not log into Pogo every day or even once a week to play games even though I have a chance of winning a jackpot spin worth real money. I check my Facebook almost every day but that includes checking on updates from my friends and family. Playing the games is a bonus that is offered at my profile site. Plus Zynga is not the only company supplying games at Facebook. Their games may have better graphics than most, but ultimately I still play games at Facebook that are not by Zynga. Such as Country Life, Mobsters, Mobsters 2, Airline Manager, Farm Town and many more. I will be disappointed to lose the Zynga games, but I will most likely be able to move on.



As for the 30% commission that is a pretty good deal. I work with a number of companies that sell Video on Demand and Online Games. I can earn between 60% to 80% recurring commission on all of my sales. Recurring includes every time a gamer pays their monthly fee to keep playing the game, every game they purchase, every movie they purchase or a monthly fee paid to view movies each month. I am one person who is able to receive a 60% to 80% commission. Facebook is a full team of people who are willing to go with only 30%. That is not a bad deal for Zynga. Ultimately Facebook has supplied the gamers for Zynga. I did not switch to Facebook in order to play Zynga games, I switched to Facebook because they have an easy layout to work with and it does not take forever for friends profiles to load because they have tons of graphics, videos, pictures and music all going on at their profile page.

Facebook wants Zynga to sign a contract that forces them to only promote their games with Facebook. If that is true I do not care for that kind of dealings. It started back in the day when Showtime had Paramount Pictures sign a contract that forced Paramount to only show their movies on Showtime for a year or more and not with HBO/Cinemax. As a fan of Paramount I felt it harsh to force fans to add Showtime to their cable bill in order to watch their movies, and we never did add Showtime to our cable bill. We either waited for it to finally show on HBO/Cinemax, viewed it at the theater or rented it. Ultimately Showtime did not make any extra money from my household.

Sources:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/196010/Farmville.html?tk=rss_news
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/05/14/facebook-ban-farmville/
http://www.geek.com/articles/games/farmville-developer-zynga-losing-members-may-leave-facebook-20100512/

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