How did they get micro-payments working? It is common knowledge to me that consumers reject mini-payments. Did the attitude change? Or has Zynga found some clever scheme?
This just shows how attention is and continues to be the scarcest commodity in an information glut world.
Maybe eyeballs mean something after all... but only if you hook it up to a way to monetize, whether its Acai Berry / daily SMS horoscope ads, OfferPal, or direct micropayments. Within the context of almost any content, that's unacceptable, but within the concept of a social game like mobwars -- all is fair game.
Yes people are making money doing low-bar / low-brow casual social network games. Why? There's no skill involved! And that's a good thing. When it's pure hedonic ramp, it's like shock of pure China White in the arm of bored people everywhere.
If we weren't 110% consumed with building Posterous, I just might be tempted to build some of this stuff myself. ;-)
Zynga's Mafia Wars is anything but low-bar. It might not be much to look at, but their execution has been nothing short of brilliant to this point. They flat out COPIED a game that was huge on Facebook (Mob Wars) and iterated their way past it. They relentlessly used short iterations, A/B testing and customer validation to beat the established competition.
The number is certainly believable. Extrapolating from my own MySpace app, they would make $22.5M annually. Doesn't surprise me that they are able to monetize a lot better ($100M), considering how much more addictive their games are and their scale benefits.
