{"id":11686,"date":"2011-05-11T01:04:00","date_gmt":"2011-05-10T23:04:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"-0001-11-29T22:00:00","slug":"dennis-dyack-social-gaming-doesn-t-look-like-real-gaming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/business\/11686-dennis-dyack-social-gaming-doesn-t-look-like-real-gaming","title":{"rendered":"Dennis Dyack: Social gaming \u201cdoesn't look like real gaming\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

In news that will make a bunch of people instantly forget what a dismal failure Too Human turned out to be, Silicon Knights’ Dennis Dyack has just totally dissed social gaming.<\/p>\n

“The trend that I see is it’s probably going to be one of the biggest bubbles and explosions that our industry’s seen in a long time and I think when it crashes it’s going to crash very hard,” he tells IndustryGamers<\/a>. “I don’t think there’s an economy there.”<\/p>\n

He reckons that the revenues generated simply don’t match up with the amount of cash invested in development. He’s also a bit of an industry expert in that area.<\/p>\n

“I don’t know about [Farmville dev] Zynga – I think that’s a big micro, but I think that the amount of venture that’s being poured in, in general, that’s most of the video game industry investment.<\/p>\n

“It looks like marketing to me. It doesn’t look like real gaming. And maybe it’ll change, I don’t know. It looks very, very dangerous.<\/p>\n

“I think Zynga’s valuated more than some traditional publishers right now that have been in the industry for decades,” he adds. “I’m sorry, but I just don’t see it. It seems imaginary to me… it doesn’t look long term healthy to me.<\/p>\n

“And right now you’re seeing a lot of influx in venture and you’re seeing a lot of excitement and a lot of pie in the sky ideas, but when games actually have to start showing pure revenue and real ‘here’s how much we made and here’s how much it cost’… I think that industry is going to not last very long.”<\/p>\n

For the moment, at least, Zynga’s social gaming empire is valued at around $5.5 billion. Maybe it’s time Dyack thought hard about a Too Humanville spin-off.<\/p>\n

<\/div><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So stop sending him those Mafia Wars invites, guys<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":161,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/161"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11686"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11686\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}