Zynga doesn't exactly look like the most honest of developers right now, that’s for sure. The only thing that could possibly make them look more diabolical would be a person claiming to be a former employee spilling the beans on the whole operation. Oh, hang on a second…
Reddit poster mercenary-games posted an IAmA thread along with a separation letter he claims to have received when he quit his job as an engineer at Zynga after 8 months, as well as some pretty alarming claims about ‘creepy stuff’ that went on.
“Spying on players. Getting intimate gaming data, their habits, their networks, and how to effectively monetise given X.” He wrote. “Another issue was skewing gameplay for the sake of profit, example; I actually resorted to BAD maths, to make the case for making a feature more fun. At the end of one sprint, a QA dude was complaining about the drop rate of a specific item being absurdly insane, and therefore UnFun. I looked at the code, and tweaked some values, gave it back to QA guy, and fun was restored. Product Manager overrides this, goes for unfun, yet more profitable version.”
When asked for comment on the recent Tiny Tower vs Dream Heights throw-down, mercenary-games had a pretty damning response about the already scorned developer. “Tiny Tower + D Heights is all standard operating procedure here. If you can’t buy em, clone em. Even the core technology for FarmVille (MyMiniLife), was bought. The only “homegrown” codebases at Zynga is MafiaWars2 and maybe Poker, the rest of their tech was just bought from small studios. Lookup Dextrose Engine. To me, that’s utterly creepy. They try to choke out the competition by gating all these engines and tech.”
So does Zynga do anything positive? Apparently the food is good, with Zynga having an ‘awesome chowhall,’ but it doesn’t seem it makes up for much else – especially the lack of, you know, fun in Zynga games.
“Zynga is a marketing company, not a games company.”
[Reddit]
