Mark Pincus

speaker

934 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 23 Jun

Mark Pincus’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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Sourcery · Mark Pincus: How to Build Billion-Dollar Products · 23 Jun 2026 podcast

And the way we thought about it is on the one hand, we wanted to innovate on how could we help you improve the relationships in your life?

How could the social interaction in Farmville

make you more likely to cross the street and say hi to somebody that you just knew online?

Were there real acts of friendship, like gifting or heroism that we could do in a game?

And then on the other hand, we thought, how do we build game mechanics that remind you and your friends to come back through these other channels, the feeds and requests and things like that?

And so we got better and better at that.

And yeah, so we had huge day 365 retention.

And that's why our original games like Zynga Poker and a couple of years later, Words with Friends are still

Some of the biggest games at Zynga, the company, however many years later, it's getting close to 20 years, 19 years later.

And every new genre of games we built, what we did was we built new social gaming mechanics.

And I had a whiteboard.

Originally, I just leaned against a wall in one of our studios, and I just wrote the name of every game mechanic I'd ever heard of.

And I just would try them and cross them out as we did them.

And every single one of them worked.

But we didn't just do a game mechanic like there's XP, achievements.

Co-op play, there's all these things that are in like MMOs and like a World of Warcraft.

We would turn it into a social game.

So we wouldn't, I like to think of it that what we are doing and often we're doing with consumer and even enterprise apps is we're kind of in the candy business and in the hoop jumping business.

And it's kind of go to Dave and Buster's or whatever the variant of Dave and Buster's is to do your market research, which my four-year-old wants me to take him to these arcades where we play these games, put $50 into these games to win tickets, and then we go to a vending machine and we can buy junk like a bouncing ball, a whistle.

It's not worth $50, but...

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