EA 联合创始人 Bing Gordon 谈 EA 为何错失移动端及 Zynga 做对了什么

Industry legend Bing Gordon says EA missed the mark in mobile because it was too slow and risk averse – which meant it then had to watch from the sidelines as Zynga led the way in those explosive early 2010s.

Gordon also spoke to us about the early days of social games, what has changed for investors and where he thinks AI will help game development just as he launches a new book, co-authored with Chloe Gordon. It’s called Everybody Wins, and is subtitled ‘What games teach us about making products people love’. It’s out on October 29.

Gordon co-founded Electronic Arts in 1982 as an early-stage start-up and served as chief creative officer until 2008, when he became a partner at Kleiner Perkins and joined Zynga’s board. He remained on Zynga’s board until Take-Two acquired the company in 2022, and now serves as an independent director at Take-Two.

What struck Gordon most about joining Zynga’s board, right as social gaming was exploding on Facebook, was the pace of growth.

“I was used to packaged goods, where we thought about games a year at a time,” he said. “When I met Zynga’s founder Mark Pincus, I was trying to convince EA that the future of games was mobile, social, freemium and instrumented.”

“Neil Young, Luc Barthelet and I were running small experiments, one project at a time, to see what might work inside EA’s model…at that pace we figured out how to get 20,000 DAUs for a few days at a time, and then we’d drop back to zero.”

Pincus, by contrast, “tested all of his ideas simultaneously and he was at 50,000 or 60,000 DAUs and holding”. “Within a year, his first two games had DAUs in the millions,” Gordon said.

In Gordon’s view, the industry still hasn’t fully absorbed two lessons from that era. The first is the power of friendship, and the importance of social loops and relationship-building features that “turn out to be the most important retention metric in games”.

“We saw that in Zynga’s data, and I also saw it empirically at EA. But the games industry at large, and even social networks like Facebook, haven’t really taken that lesson to heart. The original social networks ended up focusing on virality and ad views. Once they’ve got your network, they don’t really care if people stay in touch with each other or not. Active friendships are a big winner in mobile, and most adjacent industries miss that.”

The second, Gordon said, is product management. The AAA business still hasn’t figured out product management, Gordon added, and many mobile companies haven’t either.

“The mobile companies that survive, like Zynga, Scopely and Playrix, turn out to be great at product management,” Gordon said. “Mobile game product managers are power players. They’re highly analytical and constantly testing.”

Why has a company with EA’s resources and IP struggled to build a mobile business to match its console and PC success? For Gordon, it comes down to a pattern he’s seen repeat across the industry, with successful companies “repeatedly learn[ing] the wrong lessons from success”.

“You get successful, and it seems too risky to try something new. You see a smaller competitor do something differently, and you don’t take it seriously. When casual social games started gaining steam, EA didn’t think they were ‘real games’,” he said.

“Even Take-Two couldn’t figure out how to build a mobile division internally, so they bought Zynga, which turned out to be a great acquisition. Zynga’s Frank Gibeau is one of the only execs who has lived in both the mobile world and the AAA world.”

Gordon spent years at Kleiner Perkins investing in games and consumer tech and said that game companies now have to “already have revenue and growth, or you have to have an AI story”.

“Venture capital has pulled back from consumer everything,” he said. “Enterprise companies, infrastructure and tools tend to more reliably have multiple stages of growth. I’ve seen a lot of investors who used to focus on consumer move to enterprise.”

On AI and game development itself, Gordon pushed back hard on the idea of one-shot game design, where a text prompt produces a finished game. He said the best examples have been “constant iteration and layered ideation”, with AI letting teams test more game design ideas along the way.

“Maybe teams can test ten times as many first drafts in the same amount of time,” he said. “Then you still need the judgment to work out which ones will work and which to double down on. That’s human.”

That’s why, Gordon said, new studios should hire “AI fluent” staff.

“Communication in game companies is hard. You want to be able to test your ideas yourself without waiting on a separate engineer to do everything for you. You want the idea generators and the idea builders to be the same people.”