I’m excited that Zynga today announced a plan to merge with Take-Two. This has been an amazing 15 year journey. I'd like to share thoughts as I reflect, and why I remain so bullish on gaming. 1/x
I started Zynga in Jan ‘07 to build a social poker game for Facebook (which had 15m users). We put real people around a table to play with real friends. We launched five months later; it quickly ballooned into the world’s largest free poker game. 2/x
Zynga was named after my dog Zinga; Nzinga was an African warrior princess. 3/x
Tomorrow, Zynga shuts down FarmVille on Facebook after 11 years. I wanted to share the story of how we created it and why it has played such an important role in the evolution of gaming. 1/x
The real innovation of FarmVille was in making games accessible to busy adults, giving them a place to invest and express themselves and be seen by people in their lives as creative. People thought of FarmVille as a sort of Etch-a-Sketch. 2/x
It was the first game at scale that leveraged big data, and almost everything inside the game was tested and optimized. FarmVille became a training ground for a generation of entrepreneurs and product managers. 3/x