It’s been a relatively quiet period for new game launches at Zynga – but that’s about to change.
Executive vice president Yaron Leyvand says recent releases Top Troops and Match Factory are just the start of a busy new release schedule that stretches out over the next two years.
“I’m excited about the slate, I think it has never been stronger,” Leyvand tells us. “We have a lot of games going out…I can’t get into names but we have announced a few and we will announce the others – in the next six to eight quarters there will be a lot of games going out, of which Top Troops and Match Factory were the first.”
So what are those games? Zynga owner Take-Two regularly mentions in financial calls that it is working on mobile versions of some of its premier IP, which includes Bioshock, Borderlands and of course Rockstar’s properties.
Leyvand says he “can’t get into too much detail,” on all of that – but “the conversations are happening”.
“We want to make sure we’re doing the right things, creating the right experiences and leveraging the right know-how with the breadth of games they have at Take-Two,” he says.
Zynga’s announced titles include Star Wars: Hunters and Sugartown, its first foray into web3 gaming. Peak also has Star Match in soft launch, as we reported last week. As for the rest: “It’s early. I won’t comment on timeline. I think when we’re ready, we’ll obviously share,” says Leyvand.
Part of the reason there have been relatively few new launches from Zynga lately is that internal criteria for a global release keeps getting stricter, says Leyvand. “We have dozens of games getting tested, all the time, every year,” he says.
“Most of them are really early on in development, four or five people trying something out. Obviously, most of them are not getting to soft launch and worldwide. We are really proud of how we leverage data in making decisions – as you get closer to launch, you get more and more data and you can be much more informed, so we have got to a place that yes, we have quite a high bar of what we think could be commercial success.”
Changes to the marketing landscape haven’t exactly encouraged mobile game firms get new releases onto the market either. Leyvand acknowledges that recent privacy policies have made Zynga think harder about new launches – though as he puts it, “Distribution was always hard”.
“It was hard two years ago, it was hard four years ago, and it will be hard two years from now,” he says. “They have made it even more complex but it’s okay, we manage it because it’s not just for us, it’s for the entire industry. Seven years ago, you would really focus on making a game that is fun, and you think is deep, and you didn’t think about the marketing that early on. Now, we’ll involve our marketing and UA and publishing teams in a game after we can see that it’s fun.”
Match Factory, Peak’s first global launch since it was acquired by Zynga for $1.8bn, is one of the few titles to make it through that process and go global. It’s a ‘Match 3D’ game like Boombox’s Triple Match 3D and Spyke’s Tile Busters, a subsection of the puzzle genre that’s “less red than the others,” says Leyvand.
“It’s ready for innovation and it’s an interesting category to play in,” he says. “Going from our research and the KPIs that we got in soft launch to now, we’re extremely bullish that this is going to be another big success for Zynga.”
“The question is how much further you can go, and what is the scale,” Leyvand continues. “We are quite confident that we have something good – is going to be huge? We don’t know yet. One of the things that we know is the elasticity of CPI – meaning that if you push more intensively the CPI usually becomes more expensive, and you get less return. So that prediction is harder and harder. I think we are better at this, but we will see. We have quite a long runway here.”
Peak, like Zynga’s previous acquisition Gram, has worked hard to maintain what Leyvand says is the “culture and the things that made them special” since the buyout. Three years later, that blending of different experiences across Zynga’s huge portfolio is vital to its combined strength, adds Leyvand.
“You can see specific features or systems or know-how move from category to category,” he adds. “I think about five, six years ago, if you want really casual users and you want to introduce a complex system or a very social feature, it would be extremely difficult for the users to comprehend. Today, it’s the expectation.”
“So the fact that you can move users from a puzzle game to a midcore game and vice versa is a great opportunity. It flows from Peak to Zynga and vice versa – this is the power of the portfolio.”
