Home. SlashKey - Home. Ngmoco:) OpenFeint - The coolest thing since sliced awesome. Chillingo - The Premier Games Publisher. Blizzard. Playfish. Zynga. Sign In. Controversies Swirl Over Purity Of Social Games, Microsoft’s Jab At ‘Nerds’ « Digital Connections – 360i Blog, Digital Marketing Agency. Earlier this month, Microsoft hosted several press events to introduce its Kinect motion control product to fashion and lifestyle press and bloggers, aiming squarely at the casual set to sell its $200 competitor to Nintendo’s profitable domination of the casual console market.The message Microsoft wanted to send was that Kinect was for the cool kids, and decidedly not its core gamer audience. AtomicPC was at the event, and reported that Microsoft’s director of entertainment and devices, David McLean, quipped to his audience “Gaming’s not just for sweaty thirty year olds in Metallica t-shirts,” among other digs at “basement-dwelling nerds” and “impenetrable control schemes.”
The core gamer community’s reaction has been extremely negative. Atomic PC’s writer on the scene said “It’s a doubly galling revelation. It’s nothing about Zynga that hasn’t been said before, but this time, Gamasutra’s Nicholas Lovell laid into the exposé’s author, accusing him of elitism. “You know what I think. FarmVillains. One of the Internet's greatest success stories in 2010 can be found in a former potato chip factory on Vermont Street in Potrero Hill. This is the original office of Zynga, the S.F. -based creator of online "social" games — FarmVille, a simple application in which participants plant and harvest crops, is the company's best-known product — that in three years has gone from scrappy startup to the toast of Silicon Valley.
Since launching its first Internet game in 2007, Zynga has grown rapidly. The company's true earnings are unknown to outsiders, but industry observers estimate that its annual revenue could now be $500 million or more. In light of Zynga's phenomenal rise, one former senior employee recalls arriving at the company eager to discover what new business practices were driving its success in a market where other popular Web 2.0 ventures struggled to make money.
Jim Wilson/The New York Times/Redux Joseph Schell Alex St. Related Stories More About It's tough to argue with success. Zynga's Secret To Success: Steal Great Ideas! Farmville.com's Site Profile. Chugulu.