Mark Pinkus: Zynga is a creative company

The executive director of Zynga said that the word “innovation” is understood differently in his company than in other game studios.  

Pinkus’ company has long been accused of copying other people’s mechanics, concepts, often even stylistics and graphic techniques. And now, at a difficult time for the company, when rumors are already circulating about her departure from the stock exchange, the executive director of Zynga gives an interview to the editor of Fast Company magazine, in which he dismisses all accusations of stealing ideas in an original way. 

According to Pinkus, innovation for Zynga is not something radically new.

“For us, innovation is the development of clear, social, fun and free games,” he said. “We don’t understand by innovation disassembly in style: whether Words With Friends is like Scrabble or not. We consider Words With Friends to be an innovative game because it brings together 10 million users.” 

As Pinkus also claims, in his company, all features are divided into three types: already proven to be effective (Proven), proven to work, but amenable to improvement (Proven But Improvable) and new (New). And Zynga is trying to balance between all of them. 

At the moment, according to AppData, 4 out of 10 projects are published by Zynga in the Facebook top. As for the mobile market, the company’s situation is worse here: there is only one project in the box office of the American top Google Play y Zynga, in the App Store, according to App Annie, Zynga has nothing at all.