RewardVille

» see rewardville.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Zynga's problem in early 2011 was that it had around ten popular games and no reason for anyone to play more than one of them. A FarmVille player was a FarmVille player. Nothing carried across, which meant every new title had to win its audience from scratch while the company was already paying Facebook for the privilege of reaching them.

RewardVille was the answer: a currency layer sitting above the entire catalog, paying you for breadth instead of depth. It launched in March 2011, announced on the 14th, and ran in six languages. You earned zPoints and zCoins by playing any Zynga game, and you spent them on virtual goods that worked inside those same games.

The ceiling was built in from the start. A player could collect up to 80 zPoints from a single game and no more than 300 in a day across all of them, which tells you exactly what the program was for. It did not want you playing one game harder. It wanted you opening a second tab.

~ the dossier ~

~ the points ~

Airline miles are the obvious model, and the comparison holds further than it should. zPoints raised a visible level number attached to your Zynga identity, which was the part doing the psychological work, while zCoins were the spendable half. Neither could be cashed out or taken anywhere outside Zynga. The entire economy was closed.

That closure is why the thing could never have been more than a retention tool. A loyalty currency good at one company's shops only has value for as long as you intend to keep shopping there, and Zynga's whole problem by 2012 was that people were deciding they did not.

~ gagaville ~

The most ambitious week RewardVille ever had was May 2011, when Zynga and Lady Gaga announced a partnership built around the Born This Way release. It was the first time the company had tied up with a musician, and the rewards were distributed through RewardVille: a Gyrosphere in CityVille, a lipstick gun in Mafia Wars. FarmVille got a whole themed region called GagaVille with an album stream attached, and FrontierVille got a Paws Up statue.

Pizza Hut followed that September with a World Hunger Relief campaign, where a donation of $5 or more bought you a choice of item across four different Zynga titles. These were the moments when the cross-game layer made sense, because a brand buying its way into Zynga wanted all the games at once and RewardVille was the only door that opened onto all of them.

~ twenty-one months ~

It was retired on 5 December 2012. By then Zynga had been public for a year, the stock had lost most of its value, and Facebook traffic to the games was falling. A loyalty program is a bet that you will keep launching titles worth being loyal across, and the company spent 2012 and 2013 shutting games down rather than adding them.

I was twenty-seven when this launched, with a Facebook account producing a steady trickle of FarmVille invitations, the same as every account in Turkey did that year. The games reached us completely. The rewards layer sitting on top of them did not, and I suspect that was true nearly everywhere: RewardVille was the sort of thing you found by accident, after clicking something you had not meant to click, and then forgot about before the points were worth anything.

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