Zynga has released another new title. Starting off with 22592 MAU.
Just when rival Crowdstar has released Happy Pets, this arrives.
But Petville is not made around the premise that you buy and sell pets in volume.
The flash artwork is top quality.
This article explains things so here’s a brief summary of it.
PetVille Getting Started Guide: How to Make Cash Fast(Games.com)
1. Clean Your Neighbor’s House
Go next door and clean out all of the neighbors trash! .. the house gets dirty every day so pick up any trash you find. If you pick up all of the trash you find you earn a bonus.
2. Refresh Wilted Flowers
Change the flowers in the vase! They will definitely dry out before the shown time so it’s a good plan to pick your flowers for when you play next time. The point being, this is what Zynga is so great at – a time managed game. Something that’s not in Pet Society.
3. Feed Your Pet in a Timely Fashion
Feed your pet! This is a similar system to the vase, a time managed function.
4. Feed Your Pet Treats … Often
Give your pet a yummy gift! … or a gift given to you by a friend and earn coins. As you would have others do to you … send out the gifts left, right and centre. Human nature should take care of the rest, the gifts should come a floodin’!
5. Visit Your Neighbors Until You Run Out of Energy
Visit your neighbors! … when you have energy. Visiting your neighbors and greeting them gives you bonuses. In other games this is limited to a single time per user but in PetVille, you can visit any number of times as long as you have energy. Energy recovers over time, this came from Mafia Wars and isn’t in Pet Society.
6. Wash Your Pet, and Other Pets, Too
Wash your pet! or even your friends. This also earns you coins but cannot but repeated over and over.
If you don’t enjoy the practicing, your player will leave for a while.
It’s similar to Sonic the Hedgehog, if you leave him for a while he starts to get bored.
So PetVille has an energy system just like Mafia Wars and a time management system like CafeWorld. Zynga is pushing repeat play and making the app sticky for return users. The design is similar to Pet Society and the player ends up really liking their character through lots of animation, items and the avatar systems. The artwork stands on it’s own and there are some items that have level limitations.
Elaborate animations that bring people back and when you just get to the point where you think you can buy something, you don7t have enough coins. Smart monetizing that appears to feed of those that crave self expression.
An amazing hybrid that uses all of the know how accumulated in social gaming.
By the way, many people will take one look and think this is a copy of Pet Society. If that’s the case then aren’t they all copying Namco or Atari?
Recently there has been a lot of news focussing on the copying of social games by the larger developers. The train and automobile industries have been doing the same thing for years though. Making similar products and competing. The audience is several million people so there is considerable marketing data to reflect upon. To sum up, social game competition is operating on a different level to games made up until this point and so people are taking time to understand them.
in 2010 game consoles will all include viral technology (in Nov the PS3 and 360 both got Facebook), the social game generation will come alive. Recently EA bought Playfish for $400M but even before that, we knew it was all coming. Before all of this began, Dragon Quest 9 had plenty of social functionality in it.
The time when sitting down and playing a game by yourself is gone, now we play with our friends.
So we can now hypothesize that society, friends and reality were really fun!
I digress but half a year before EA bought Playfish, EX buys Playfish for $400M
Playfish had this inetersting thig to say.
Game developer makes the bold prediction, “game consoles will become a nich market”. (gamebusiness.jp)
When the game consoles have incorporated viral technology to a decent degree, we would like to develop for them again.
The other da I found out that Galaga and 2 other games are available for download on the Wii. I want to play by myself ..
There are times when we want to just play by ourselves, hey.
* This Zynga is is still beta and the design may well change in big ways. Watching for their updates is going to be interesting!
