Who says Farmville is a waste of time? The people at Zynga sure don't think so--here's why that's the case.

Virtually everyone knows somebody who plays FarmVille--or, better yet, even plays the game themselves.  Almost to a person, those familiar with the on-line game says it's time-consuming and highly "addictive."  I know people who claim to spend hours upon hours--up to six hours at a time--playing FarmVille, "cultivating" their crops, adding to their livestock holdings, building their pre-tend aggie-complex, and acquiring equipment to operate it with.  

By the way, if you're one of the rare people not familiar with FarmVille, all that I've described so far is virtual, it's pretend; people play this on-line "game" for virtual things; nothing's real!   But get one thing straight:  It's far from being pretend for Zynga, the company that sponsors the game; to the contrary, it is immensely profitable.  Let me describe how much...

A person needn't pay to play--and most people don't--but a person can pay with real, actual money to take short-cuts to grow virtual crops, harvest virtual fruit, buy virtual horses, build virtual buildings--but you don't have to.  And to be sure, most people don't pay, but a few do--and do they pay! Last year people who elected to play FarmVille using real money to supplement their gamesmanship paid about $600M dollars, providing Zynga with a net profit of close to $100M.  

World-wide, FarmVille has about 232M active participants each month, but less than 10% of those who pay generate about a third of the revenue, or an average of about $85 apiece; some pay more, most pay less.  Based on data from similar, on-line game competitors, the majority are males with an average age around 50.  

It turns out that these kind of games appeal to a certain kind of person, a person called a "whale" in the trade.  Just as Las Vegas and gambling type games generally seem to appeal to risk-takers and those who find appeal in the prospect of quick riches, games like FarmVille seem to attract a slightly different personality type, one that values both accomplishment and comparative attainment--if only in terms of a silly on-line game.  In a Bloomberg Businessweek report on Zynga's success and its application to the SEC for an initial public offering, a exec familiar with the business and the company states...

“The compulsion in Vegas is the illusion you can make money. The compulsion in social games is the illusion you can be more successful than your friends,” says Peter Relan, chief executive officer of CrowdStar, a Zynga rival that has about 24 million players, including as many as 200 people who spend more than $10,000 a year. “In both cases, you’re working with people’s emotions and psychological needs...Relan and executives at other virtual-goods companies say they tend to be comparatively wealthy, older players. They’re also willing to pay to get ahead and avoid the slog of achievement—such as constructing buildings and collecting rent in CityVille—usually necessary to earn the in-game currency for buying virtual items."

Make sense to you? If you're a FarmVille player, do you think these personality traits explain your attraction to the game?  If you don't, but know people who do, does this describe those you know who play?  Needless to say, these kinds of explanations provide perfect fodder for side-walks psychologists to engage in plenty of cocktail chatter.  

Almost everyone I've talked to about the matter says that they think that FarmVille is just a stupid, time-consuming game--even those who are active players!  But from Zynga's perspective, however, it's far from a dopey game; indeed, understanding the economic model tells us something very different.  Instead, it's a way to cast a wide net for free, if only to troll for certain types of people how will be willing to pay the sponsor sometimes tidy sums of money.  

I still won't play the game, but I now think of FarmVille in a different light; I no longer think it's just a time-consuming, dopey game.  In other words, I understand its appeal, if not to me, at least to others--and especially its appeal to the people at Zynga!  
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