You think Wall Street business is tough? Apparently you haven't seen anything until you've been in the Social Media Gaming business.  The SF Weekly has conducted numerous interviews with past employees of Zynga, the company behind Farmville and Mafia Wars, to bring us some pretty jarring stuff about the company.

An ex-employee of the FarmVille team has recounted Zynga boss Mark Pincus' alleged words: "I don't fucking want innovation. You're not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers."


I suppose you can call that a business plan of sorts, and it may account abit for the overwhelming crap that comes out of Social Gaming every day.

The former employee went on to reveal Zynga's unofficial company motto of "Do Evil", which is an adaptation of Google's much friendlier "Don't Be Evil".

"I would venture to say it is one of the most evil places I've run into, from a culture perspective and in its business approach," the source said.
Well it's good to have direction.  At least now we can all feel better when we hide or ban our facebook friends for constantly putting that crap on our wall.  You might want to tell your hippie friend, you know the one who just got back from Burning Man, smells like burnt hair and is wearing crocs, that their farm is nothing more than a slave-mill to an evil corporation.

FarmVille boss 'doesn't f***ing want innovation' (Computers and Video Games)

Comments

  • Avatar
    linkingday
    14 years, 9 months ago

    I know you're into some weird shit, but WHAT THE FUCK?!

  • Avatar
    Warpedpixel
    14 years, 9 months ago

    I gave up on supporting Zynga's buisness a long time ago

  • Avatar
    Darknezz
    14 years, 9 months ago

    Bobby Kotick is behind Farmville?

  • Avatar
    Skrams
    14 years, 9 months ago

    That's....that's actually kinda creepy.

  • Avatar
    inthenameofharmon
    14 years, 9 months ago

    I knew those fricken cows looked to happy. It's not even a farm anymore, you got fricken' disco giraffes and roller blading sheep. It's David Lynch the video game now.....

  • Avatar
    s1yfox
    14 years, 9 months ago

    lmfao who wouldve thought a greater evil was behind such a gentle game XD

  • Avatar
    SiShenDao
    14 years, 9 months ago

    TL;DR because it was about facebook games

  • Avatar
    David
    14 years, 9 months ago

    Farmville is a copy of Farm Town. Mafia Wars is a copy of Mob Wars. That quote from the Zynga boss is not surprising at all. Should I care if their boss is an asshole? My boss is an asshole, and I bet yours is too. Zynga isn't the only company to copy facebook game ideas. What does surprise me is the obvious lack of copyright control on facebook games.

  • Avatar
    Rendrak
    14 years, 9 months ago

    This is sadly where the video game industry is going. Casual copy-paste shit that's easy to produce and sells millions.

    And damn, Joseph, your unrelated article pictures never cease to give me nightmares.

  • Avatar
    spookyfox1
    14 years, 9 months ago

    was i the only one who had to scroll the page down far enough to read the article, so that creepy picture wasn't staring at me?

  • Avatar
    ZAMNES
    14 years, 9 months ago

    I unfortunately got sucked into Farmville for a good two weeks because people on Facebook wouldn't stop bugging me about adding them as neighbors and gifting them nails.

    What a horrible waste of time.

    I'm not surprised to see that Zynga is evil. It explains so much.