acebook users of a certain age may remember a particularly forlorn farm animal popping up in their feeds during the platform’s heyday. The lonely cow would wander into FarmVille players’ pastures with its face twisted into a frown and its eyes shimmering with tears. “She feels very sad and needs a new home,” an accompanying caption read, asking you to adopt the cow or message your friends for help. Ignore the cow’s plea and it would presumably be left friendless and foodless.
Features such as the lonely cow, which let players nudge their friends with requests to grow their farm, became central to the experience, flooding Facebook with posts and notifications advertising FarmVille to the masses. Such viral mechanics turned the game “into a topic of conversation akin to a meme,” says former Zynga vice president and general manager Roy Sehgal. “This watercooler effect made you want to join in because you saw your friends playing.
New features and content were added several times a week to keep players engaged, but the real magic happened behind the scenes with Zynga’s in-house data analytics tool ZTrack. Capable of monitoring the most granular player actions – from what features they used, to how long they spent using them, and right down to where they clicked on the screen – it was intended to build a total, ever-evolving, data-driven picture of player interests.
The dirty little secret of Zynga is, of the five corporate values, none is more important than metrics
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