"It takes nothing to produce a hot game. You merely need somebody with a computer, a good idea, and the ability to make a game. Making a game is not rocket science. Making matters worse for Zynga is that it does not and never will control the distribution channels."
Yes, that's why everyone with a CS degree has made millions of dollars. This is offensive to everyone that makes games.
His point isn't that everyone can do it, obviously that's not true, but that there is nothing about it that requires a multi-billion dollar company. To wit, the barrier to entry is low.
>You merely need somebody with a computer, a good idea, and the ability to make a game
The barrier to entry is low from the perspective of sunken costs other than development time, being a purely creative endeavor that you can work on with mostly free software tools.
However, the talent required to pull off a quality game and the time it takes are huge and only grow exponentially. That in recent years we've got a couple of indie games that were successful, that's only because on mobile devices the expectations for CGI quality are for the moment low. Plus, with these app stores, the budget required for marketing has decreased, if you're lucky enough to have your app featured.
And while you can create indie games for the desktop and be successful, as Minecraft shows, the expectations for quality CGI are much higher and so it takes an insane amount of creativity to fill the blanks.
Now, of course, Zynga games are not really on the same level as what id Software or Blizzard are releasing and you can certainly picture yourself pulling off games of the same quality, as Zynga games are nothing special, except for the social-network effects.
However you shouldn't underestimate the effort required to build a game from scratch. I consider it to be by far one of the most challenging fields in software development, as not only it requires great feats of engineering, but it also requires creativity and design. E.g. developers by themselves can barely pull it off without the help of a good artist that can draw.
... but the barrier to success on the scale of FarmVille or Draw Something is very high. That's when a company with massive amounts of money that can be spent to hire game developers and market to users has a distinct advantage.
Since this article is about Zynga as a publicly traded company, I interpreted the author's statement in terms of capital investment, not capability. To put the author's statement in perspective, compare Zynga to Valve. Both have been successful creating and selling games, but Valve is actively working to control its distribution channel. Which business model would you invest in?
They use that 'science' for optimization of various metrics within the game: retention, monetization, etc. Game design begins much earlier, and a lot of it is not subject to the experimental method: look at their failed games like Mafia Wars 2, and understand that their fundamental flaws can't be iterated or experimented off.
Yes, that's why everyone with a CS degree has made millions of dollars. This is offensive to everyone that makes games.