Zynga CEO Mark Pincus took the stage at D10 and was in an interview with Kara Swisher and talked about Words with Friends to Farmville long enough to reach the topic of console gaming.
Mark said that his company is not interested in getting into the console world. "We're aiming for you," he said while pointing at Swisher. "We're going after the mainstream market. There's too much friction [in the console world]."
When talking about the undeniable shift to mobile, he made clear that there's still a huge amount of desktop traffic on Zynga's games -- "lots of people play while bored on conference calls at work," he quipped.
In response to a question from The Verge's Josh Topolsky - on Zynga's plans on operating as a fully detached company that didn't necessarily rely on Facebook for practically all of its revenue -- Mark offered the following regarding its plans to move forward:
"We've never thought in terms of attachment or detachment from Facebook. There's nothing stopping us from putting games in all kinds of places, as we find opportunities. Facebook has met our 90-10 rule [related to explosive growth potential], making it worthy of more and more investment. We're just seeing Android and iOS having the potential to be there. I think about this like the evolution of TV -- at the beginning there may have been one or two channels, but what really happened was that people genuinely wanted to watch TV. It wasn't created by the networks. There was a relationship between us and content -- us and Mad Men, or whatever your show is. Eventually, we found each other, and I think the same is true with play. I think we will go anywhere that we see the potential to make it social.
We see Facebook as a platform, just as we see iOS and Android. We're not worried that we'll get too attached to iOS and Android. We'd love to have a much bigger business on those platforms; if they became a huge concentration for us, I don't think we'd feel that we didn't have a business, we'd be excited that they grew that much."
[TechCrunch]We see Facebook as a platform, just as we see iOS and Android. We're not worried that we'll get too attached to iOS and Android. We'd love to have a much bigger business on those platforms; if they became a huge concentration for us, I don't think we'd feel that we didn't have a business, we'd be excited that they grew that much."
