Scalable Social Games, Robert Zubek of Zynga (liveblog)

Social games interesting from an engineering point of view sinc ethey live at the intersection of games and web. We spend time thinking about making games fun, making players want to come back. We know those engineering challenges, but the web introduces its own set, especially around users arriving somewhat unpredictably, effects where huge populations come in suddenly. SNSes are a great example of this, with spreading network effects and unpredictable traffi fluctuations.

At Zynga we have 65m daily players, 225m monthly. And usage can vary drastically — Roller Coaster Kingdom gained 1m DAUs in one weekend going from 700k to 1.7m. Another example, Fishville grow from 0 to 6m DAUs in one week. Huge scalability challenges. And finally, Farmville grew 25m DAUs in five months. The cliff is not as steep but the order of magnitude difference adds its own challenge.

Talk outline: Introducing game developers to best practices for web development. Maybe you come from consoles or mobile or whatever, the web world introduces its own set of challenges and also a whole set of solutions that are already developed that we steal, or, uh, learn from. 🙂 If you are alreayd an experiened web developer, you may know this stuff already.

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