Farmville: Growing a farm in a blue ocean

Farmville. The silly game by Zynga where players create virtual farms, advancing through levels of play like my son moves through the levels of Halo.

I told my 13 year-old Tier 1 traditional game playing son that someday I'll reach Level 70 and he rolled his eyes: "Great .. I'll tell my friends my dad's a Level 70 prestige." "In Modern Warfare?" he went on, guessing their question. "Nope..." he said ... smiling and anticipating his answer: "Farmville. Then I'll hide."

Farmville, and the company behind it, Zynga Games, have unleashed an enormously popular Blue Ocean Strategy mega-hit.

Farmville makes money by offering users the option to purchase virtual goods, like fuel to farm faster and buildings and trees. There's lots of commentary about how ridiculous it is that people pay real money for things that aren't real. But, of course, we buy intangible goods for fun all the time and always have. Nobody questions purchasing a ticket to a ballgame or movie but you walk away with nothing but nice memories (unless your home team is the Florida Marlins and you actually care who wins, but that's for another post on a different blog)...

Zynga has many games but none are as popular as Farmville; they've clearly opened up a Blue Ocean with their silly, friendly farming community. Let's look at what the key elements of Farmville likely are in the context of the Four Actions Framework:

Eliminated
* Game consoles - I don't even think you can play Farmville on a traditional game console.
* Violence - You can't even eat your chickens; everybody's a vegetarian. Points are gained from cooperation - competition doesn't exist in Farmville.

Reduced
* Graphics - This is a recurring favorite in BOS games; masses of buyers just don't seem to care about stunning graphics.
* Barriers to entry - It's easy and free to get started; there's actually no need to ever pay Zynga anything, though people voluntarily do. There's no magic key combination's, no disk, no strange terminology to learn; just a virtual person with simple farming tools.

Raised
* Community - Sharing is at the heart of Farmville; there are a lot of prizes that can only be obtained by helping neighboring farmers.
* Creativity. Lots of players use land that could be raising virtual coins or experience for highly decorated villas that raise no coins or experience.
* Education - Deciding on which crops to buy while balancing time, size, and cost constraints is the core of many business operations; a whole batch of manufacturing COO's is being secretly trained.

Created
* Advancement by asynchronous cooperation. Like every Blue Ocean Strategy creation it existed before but being able to help one another, without the need to help in real-time, encourages cooperation while acknowledging real world time constraints. You can play with your friends without coordinating times.

Like all BOS offerings there will be lots of copycats. They'll likely focus on technological innovation; faster game play, better graphics .. whatever their engineers decide their Tier I buyers want. They'll predictably bring in a stash of venture capital and just as predictably fail; we know from history that it's nearly impossible to "beat" a Blue Ocean Strategy businesses, even those where managers trained in traditional marketing do their best to throw away their BOS benefits.

For anybody who wants to be my Farmville neighbor my email address is olenick@valueinnovation.net; on Facebook I'm at http://www.facebook.com/olenick. See ya' on the farm.