A Tree Falling in the Forest

A few posts ago I promised to write about metrics based design. The kind of stuff going on inside the social game companies who like to listen to the crowds over the designers. I was thinking and thinking and then I realized that even though it just does not feel right to me, I am a “suit,” not a game designer and I am not going to figure it out. But it led to me to think about a bigger issue. The power of the Internet and growth of social network brings an increased focus to the "Wisdom of Crowds." I've fallen for it too, writing about the hive mind and how quickly a group can come together to solve a given problem. It is easy to be seduced by the aggregated brilliance. I mean after all, how can you question the resource responsible for contributions like Metacritic, Cheez Whiz and Abba? The crowd wisdom concept did not start inside Zynga. It is attributed to Sir Francis Galton who held a contest at a county fair to guess the weight of a cow. While the guesses...

For the fourth straight month mainstream media is reporting declining sales and the demise of our business. I am amazed when I read an article about rumors of seconds old Playdom in discussions with Disney for an acquisition at a valuation of USD 600 million or Zynga securing financing at purported USD 2 billion valuation while analysts and commentators say the game business is dying. Are they making games, or just money? We are not in the midst of a declining market, we are suffering from a lack of measurement. Genius analysts are out there with quotes like, For the month of June, Pachter predicts game software sales measured by NPD will decline by 8% from the same month last year. Doug Creutz of Cowen & Co. predicts a 17% decline for June, and said he expects the slowness to continue through the summer. and they treat it like it is relevant to anything at all. It is kind of like saying "buggy whip sales" are falling through the floor so consumers obviously d...