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Comment by wavephorm | Hacker News Reader

Zynga is a bullshit company, they know it, we know it, but in the real world the people playing their games really don't give a shit as long as they can earn one banana per click. So they keep clicking, over and over. Welcome to the real world of internet marketing.

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Except we have good reason to believe that Zynga has peaked. They haven't been able to replicate the success of Farmville, their active user base is shrinking, and customer acquisition is becoming prohibitively expensive.

All in all it certainly looks like the "glorified slot machine" formula of "social gaming" is dying, and that is immensely gratifying to me.

That's exactly the same thing as saying the number of people who fall prey to email marketing has peaked.

How so?

I want to make sure I'm reading your comment correctly: are you trying to say that people are too stupid to figure out they're being played, and that they'll run on the Zynga treadmill for as long as Zynga pleases?

I think data presents a reality less cynical than yours.

It sounds like he's saying that Zynga's business model will plateau, with 'the new suckers born every minute' replacing their fed-up customers that leave.

There's a sucker born every minute. For every existing user that realizes that clicking a button 800 times in a day is a waste of time, there's at least one new unsuspecting zombie adding a Zynga game to their Facebook account.

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