Zynga discusses perceived lack of innovation in their games

Zynga has endured a lot of accusations that its success has come from ripping off other games, as EA put it when they filed suit against them, “Stealing other people’s games is Zynga’s well-known playbook.”

On Thursday, at Fast Company’s Innovation Uncensored Conference in San Francisco, Zynga CEO Mark Pincus responded to a question about how Zynga chooses between innovating or cloning features when making games.

“Our company defines innovation differently than other companies,” Pincus explained. “We define innovation differently than the whole game industry does. And sometimes that’s been at odds. For us, innovation is about making games more accessible, more social, more fun, and feeling more free. Giving you more value for your time and sometimes your money. As a result, we don’t define innovation by whether or not our Words With Friends game looks different enough from Scrabble. We think it’s an innovative game because it has connected tens of millions of people together.”

He also gave some insight into Zynga’s development process, explaining that the company puts game features into three categories: Proven, Proven But Improvable, and New. According to Pincus, it’s all about balance – if they focused too much on the New pile, R&D costs would be too high; if they didn’t try new features no one would have a reason to play their games.

For Pincus, the innovation is measured in “how many happy players we’ve generated and how social they are with each other.”

Zynga dominated Facebook with four out of the top ten apps, with FarmVille 2 racking up 60.6 million monthly active users.