There are a lot of so called exploits from various sources on various Zynga games. They are often erroneous, but not always. We’ve seen our share of these things, and some that are said to have worked raise some eyebrows with people like me. There is one other exploit that is not known well, and this post covers that. In addition, I can offer some other insight from past experience in how certain things work (and don’t) at various levels.

I have posted before with various articles concerning the lack of collaboration, the inability of Zynga, the lack of sound logic being implemented, etc. I’ve harped on this for ages along with quality issues. Others have griped about prefabricated emails from customer service that solve nothing, and are meaningless. We’ve heard the numbers from Zynga of some 7 or 8 million emails a month to customer service. Where do they all go?

The answers may surprise you or even enrage you. I came across a source with some very direct insight with Zynga. For the protection of that sources identity, certain specifics will not be made as to not cause calamities and to circumvent certain adverse eventualities with certain entities and individuals. What could be so adverse to an entity like Zynga or a vendor to them? The truth can be.

I came across a source that has dealt with Zynga personally. This source works for a large telecommunications company. If I mentioned the name, you would likely recognize it. This entity sold a product to Zynga. In the course of dealing with this particular type of product, one would have to know certain aspects of a given organization as to better advise them and to be able to configure things so that they work as intended, and effectively.

Picture yourself running a company like Zynga. You make games for social networking sites. You have your administrative staff, and you have those who actually make the product. Imagine yourself running a company in which, you have no idea exactly who is making your product. You’ve never seen them. Maybe you’ve never met them, and you never interact with them. You only see an end result. That’s Zynga.

It is apparent that there are a limited number of employees at Zynga in California. Sources say that there are 45 employees at their headquarters. Of those people, not a one is involved in the technical aspects of the development of any game that they create. It’s simply an administrative hub that has entities within the US and across the globe doing development work. There is no centralization of anything. The people at Zynga refer to these individuals as “ghosts”. They never see them and they do little if any interacting with them at all.

It is said that the Flash architects live in the UK. Anything pertaining to Flash development is done there. Of those, some of those individuals are believed to have immigrated from India. As for the rest of the developers, they are scattered about either within the US or elsewhere overseas. They are not physically present at Zynga.

In the past, I’ve said that there appears to be no collaboration of any kind. The information I have that has come to me says this is correct. It’s a number of people developing software, and simply putting it out there. The so called beta testers are elsewhere in the US. There was no mention either way of a QA department to test what is written.

If you have noticed with gifting, there is a script that renders that and the logic for things within the gifthouse. There are several redirects from that page if you wish to continue within Mafia Wars to play the game. The rest of the game is not written in a like manner. There are differences in logic between various cities that are supposed to more or less work the same. It only seems to be an integrated solution, but it’s a lot of people doing their own thing, and implementing their own thing with no focus. From what information I have, this appears to be the case.

If you recall, there was a major issue with Mafia Wars. There was a message that stated new servers were brought online to remedy the situation. I had my suspicions on that, and additional information seems to bring that story into question.

There are two locales in which Zynga’s server farms live. I use the term not as a punn on Farmville, but in a technical sense. A sever farm is a setup in which several clusters work to perform the same purpose. These farms live near Palo Alto, and somewhere in Virginia. It is perceivable that this farm is near the Herndon, VA/DC metro area for various reasons. It helps to be near a primary node or major gateway with a large volume of traffic.

When you have a location as that, pending the volume of traffic you receive a month, you are billed accordingly for what is known as a managed hosting solution. A managed hosting solution for a smaller outfit is at least $15,000 a month. If you require more real estate for rack space, more bandwidth, etc., you’re looking at more money. If you have a need to be closer to a primary node or from a primary node, that gets incredibly expensive. As of summer of 2000, a major telecommunications provider like UU Net, AT & T, etc., will allow you a feed off a primary node from the world wide web for $180,000 a month. That’s for the bandwidth and nothing more.

This is a very expensive thing to do with that sort of volume for just hosting. If you have an enterprise solution with the amount of traffic that Zynga has, it costs a bundle. You have 45 people working in southern California for a price. I can tell you that due to the cost of living, 50K is often an entry level or insulting wage for that part of the world.

The going rate for a run of the mill developer for that part of the world who is experienced is 80K per annum. A project manager is around 100K-120K per annum within that same field and location. A good Flash developer typically goes for anywhere between $40 and $60 an hour pending the location and experience.

If you figure on an average salary for 45 people of $60K and $80K annually, you’re looking at around $300K a month for payroll if not more. You have to have your other overhead such as office space, utilities, hosting costs, etc. That means a cost of around $500K-$700K is what it takes each month for Zynga to operate.

So what does it cost for engineering time for Zynga to develop these games? If you outsource the development of these games, the engineering time is at the very bottom of the pyramid. It is the core of the company, and the lowest paid group on the organizational chart.

The typical wage for someone working for an outsourced position in Mumbai, New Delhi, etc., is about the equal to 25 cents an hour typically in US dollars. I only know of one places that pays an entire dollar an hour for engineering time. If you need a large amount of resources for very little money, India is a great place to look. However, quality is very hard to find. I say that speaking with other sources in the past and seeing these things first hand.

I once had a position in which I was laid off for financial reasons. I learned some years later that my job went to a team of 30 people in India. That was for just the one project I was working on singlehandedly. It is perceivable to have an amount close to that in human resources working on Zynga projects.

If you do the math, for labor of 25 cents to 50 cents an hour (approximately 20 rupees an hour pending on the exchange rate compared to the dollar and the exact amount), that’s about $1200-$2400 a month for engineering time for 30 man weeks a month. The same labor in the US could be around $100K to $200K a month with ease doing the same work.

Zynga would need 2%-3% of their players to pay $10 a month on average for favor points and other game credits to make a decent margin. Zygna has stated in advertisements that they have a good 500,000 players for Mafia Wars. If you figure the course of all their games, they have perhaps some 3 million players a month. If 3% of them pay $10 for some game credit, they make $900K a month. After expenses, they might clear $200K a month.

These estimates may be on the more extreme end of being optimistic based on how sales averages in general work. If there was US based labor, the profit margin would be a lot tighter or the cost of game credits would have to increase to support US wages. However, the end result is quite problematic.

Nobody from what I gather is on the same page. Nobody really personally deals with any developer. There is a greater dollar amount placed on administrative costs and network costs than there is development of the core product. Due to the lack of collaboration and interaction, various inconsistencies come about. As such, quality goes down the tubes. If something is wrong, and it takes an entire man week to fix, it’s no big deal. Why? The labor is so incredibly cheap, it’s almost immaterial if not immaterial with respect to all expenditures.

Between personal experiences, and other sources that do business overseas, there are some things that can be identified:

1.Competent engineering has been cited as a problem. It can be found, but it is quite difficult to find when hiring someone.
2.Literacy amongst the general population is a problem, and part of why competent engineers are hard to come by for a given discipline.
3.Retention is an issue as the labor market is such that there is no such thing as loyalty. If someone gets the equal to 5 cents in the US in an hourly pay increase, they’re gone. There is no notice. There is nothing. They’re gone.
4.This same labor pool is complacent to the point where if something isn’t right on a fundamental technical level, they won’t say anything in efforts to appease their wage payer or client.
5.They’re very cheap to the point where the only way to compete against the wages being paid would be to work for free in the US or significantly below minimum wage. At that point, various managers would question the quality of the work or the validity of the offer.

Things look great on paper. However, there are fundamental technical issues which prove to be problematic as is the case with Mafia Wars.

The game won’t load for today about half the times I try. I get a 500 error-which means something within the game itself has a bug that is causing it to stop processing. It’s not consistent. I know of someone that can’t post comments to their feed. This has been a problem in the past, and this should be a very simple task to accomplish. If it can’t be done and it’s a recurring issue, this is usually due to something like the absence of code versioning, mixing old bugs with new problems as a result, or just having a complete pile of spaghetti for code in which things are unintentionally bypassed.

If you look at the profiles from Zynga’s site as to executive management and such, these people are network types. Speaking from experience, these people end up in a higher level management position, and they will spend untold amounts on network infrastructure. They will raise hell and gripe about engineering time for development of software. It is not uncommon for someone of like capacity to spend a few hundred thousand dollars on a network appliance, and complain about the cost of software for a fraction of that to achieve a given task.

The issue here is that the software that is being written is the foundation of the company. Every last piece of infrastructure depends on the functionality of their games, and how that influences or dissuades people from paying for game credits. That’s how revenue is generated, and a poor quality game is going to dissuade people from buying into these things.

The quality of the game isn’t because of people working remotely. People can work remotely and collaborate. It works better for some places than others, and it does present some obstacles that are more or less difficult to overcome pending the particulars. However, you can’t just put a lot of people who aren’t as competent as they ought to be to just throw something together in complete tandem without any oversight, and expect it to work.

It has been said by Bill Lara that there is a thread to speak with developers directly, and it is believed that changes are made to the game on the fly against production. It is said that certain tweaks can be made to individual players. When you develop anything for any organization, you don’t use production as a development environment. You have to have a dedicated development environment, and then after it’s tested and believed to work, it’s deployed to production. There should be minimal if any errors on production. If there are any errors, these should be easy to fix if the product was developed soundly to begin with. Then again, for this menial pay, what does one expect? You don’t get enterprise class skill and methodology for slave wages.

So what happens? 7 or 8 million people email someone. They get an automated reply as you can’t possibly get to all those emails. It costs too much. So you handle things that way. In the meantime, if something breaks within the game, the common conception is that things need to be continually maintained within software projects. That’s not necessarily true, and it doesn’t have to be that way or to the extent that it is. So given that, even if there is a lot of maintenance, it’s always a cheap fix. It looks cheap on paper, but what is being ignored is that you have an organization skimping on what is core to the company.

So the next time you or someone you know of spends $20 on a game with Zynga, you just paid for most of the paycheck for someone overseas after their merchant bank and payment processor takes their fee.

Source : http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=204395652394&topic=25815