Strange Design

The danger of "always live" development - how Disney killed Fix-It Felix on iOS

A week or two back I grabbed "Fix-it Felix" for free on my iPad.  I know some of the folks making the official "Wreck-it Ralph" DS / console game, I'm looking forward to seeing the film, and the premise looked solid.

I loved it.

It wasn't as especially clever game, and there were some clear problems with it at times (barriers that prevented you from moving were hard to see, and there was no feedback for "you can't move there" to differentiate it from the all-too-common "you didn't hit the move button properly"...) but I had a great time with it.  I told my friends to check it out.  It kept me aware of the film - all good things.

But then today I saw there was an update for it - and now the game is ruined.  All the level layouts are different - the visual feedback system is different - the controls are different.  Some elements seem to be gone from the game - though they probably just got moved to later levels.  Disney took a really charming game and just clubbed it into mush.  Ugh.

Always Live

I'm really excited about the shift the game industry has taken the past few years - I think moving to smaller teams, niche releases, free-to-play, and always-live games is a great opportunity for those of us in the development community.  But as with all change, these new paradigms are sometimes used poorly - which can shake our faith in their validity.

Always-Live game development means you change the game out from under people - all the time - without warning.  Farmville was the real pioneer here, with double-blind A/B testing and design-by-numbers.  It's a powerful idea, and it can really make games better.  Making games better is, by any measure, a good thing!  But this sort of unfettered access to games that are already being played can go horribly wrong - as I've just described with Fix-it Felix.  These changes weren't the result of careful testing - they are just changes made blindly.  Blind changes are a useful tool during internal development - being bold with your direction can reveal some really unexpected truths about your game.  But blind changes in a live game break the trust between developer and player.

Do developers have the right to change their game without asking permission?  Yes.  Should they be ridiculed when they make mistakes?  Yes.

Scoping with Play-Doh

I've been doing a lot of pitch work recently - giving big ideas and high-level overviews of proposed new projects.  It's a fun time in a project because it's incredibly easy in some respects - since the project does not yet exist, it's trivial to make adjustments.

Cutting Features, Adding Features, Feature Creep

Lots of my colleagues speak in terms of "features" for each new game.  Each new feature is geven a cost (in time, effort, and money) and groups of features are added, removed, and traded in these early meetings.  But something about this language hasn't been sitting well with me - because I know from being on the production end that "features" are not modular elements we can manipulate individually - no more than you can simply remove a wall from the side of your house or cut out a middle floor from an office tower.

Instead, I like to think of my project proposals as being built out of Playh-Doh.  The question is "how much do we have?"  And then we simply allocate to fit our requirements.  You can make nearly identical things out of differetn amounts of Play-Doh - the only difference is their scale.  If you can make a castle out of X amount, you can make a smaller castle out of Y.  You don't build half a castle - you build a whole castle which is smaller.

Ruled by Constraints

Of course there are limits to how small you can make things - we call these constraints.  If you have some doll furniture which needs to fit inside your castle, that provides a constraint.  If you need to be able to stand inside it - that's a constraint.  So it's not the case that projects made with less material are identical scaled-down models of larger proposals - but they are still whole-unto-themselves entities.

Considering: FTL

FTL has been in the gaming press the past few weeks, and for good reason - it is excellent. At the core, FTL is a really tight ship simulator. On that framework there is combat, economy, and a few canned events. It's a very limited package, but the laser-like focus and the wonderful interaction between the game's systems make it much more compelling than most spaceship games.

If there are any shortcomings, they have to do with the economic model. The game requires you to buy items / crew / repairs from "stores" scattered throughout the systems. But these stores have only a limited inventory - and therein lies the problem. If you are depending on a particular resource - more missiles, for example, or more drones, or more crew - you can get totally screwed by a poor store selection. This is exacerbated because each store carries only one kind of resource - so if you want drones the drone-store is a goldmine for you, but useless to most other ships. Eventually, most ships have an interest in most items. But initially the scatter of the items for purchase is too wide.

Integrated design elements

The ship simulation is accomplished through tight-knit simulation of seven systems:

• Ships are modeled as a series of rooms connected by doors.
• Crew occupy one space in a room, move at some set speed, and their actions are determined by the room they occupy.  (A crew member in the cockpit is a pilot, etc.)
• Some rooms have a "system" within them, and some do not.
• Each room has an Oxygen level, displayed visually by the color of the room.
• Weapon hits affect a single room - dividing their damage between the hull, systems, and crew.
• Each ship has some number of "power" cells, which may be allocated between systems.
• Some systems (shields, weapons, drones) have sub-elements which divide up the power provided to their parent system.

When you fight another ship (fighting other ships is about 90% of what you'll do in the game) they fire weapons at you - these weapons might hit your shields, or they might hit a room in your ship.  If they hit a room they damage your hull, systems in that room, and any folks in that room.  Some weapons can even cause a breach - creating a hole in the room which quickly sucks out all the oxygen.

If you have a breach it is important to close all the doors around that room, so that most of your ship still has oxygen.  Then again, if a fire is started on your ship you might find that venting all the oxygen out of the room is the fastest & easiest way to put it out.  Now imagine what happens if your "Door" system is damaged such that you can no longer remotely open & close doors - you might be in a situation where you are frantically trying to repair the door system as the oxygen drains out of the room.

And all the meanwhile that enemy ship continues to fire on you, and you continue to fire on it.  If your oxygen system breaks it's not too bad - assuming that you aren't fighting breaches or fires!

The best defense

Initially players of FTL will focus on keeping their own ship alive.  But eventually you realize that you can use your knowledge of the simulation elements to defeat your enemies more rapidly.  You can upgrade your surveillance systems (or use psychic crew members) to see where the crew is working on your opponent's ship - a few firebombs in those systems might send them scrambling, unable to man the weapons.  Boarding actions are very exciting - you can send a crack team into the enemy ship to wreak havoc on their systems even without punching through their shields.  But do they have upgraded security doors that will slow down your assault?

Engine upgrades, pilot skill, and engineering skill all contribute to your ship's evasion chance - by focusing on engine power you can dodge a lot of attacks!  But without a pilot your evasion drops to 0.  This makes attacks on the enemy pilot quite attractive, especially against faster ships.

Power Overwhelming

The final piece of the sim is your power allocation.  This is pretty much the same allocation problem we used in Tie Fighter (or Cybercon III!).  Put all your power into the engines to boost your evasion rate.  Power up shields to prevent damage.  Allocate more power to weapons to keep more turrets firing.  Don't forget to keep power running to your oxygen and med bay!

The really interesting, sensible twist here is that you cannot simply put an arbitrary amount of power into any system - each system is limited by a power cell ranking, which you have to increase as an upgrade.  So you purchase increases to each system's power limit separately from simply increasing the maximum number of power cells you can deploy.  The pricing scheme really encourages you to purchase increased limits before purchasing more power - which ensures that you always have interesting decisions to make regarding power allocation.

These power cell units are ALSO your systems HP - so adding more power capacity to weapon means it is harder for opponents to take out your weapon systems.  It is a wonderfully elegant system.  This also means that when a system is temporarily damaged, you gain unallocated power which can be put elsewhere.  I'll often increase my engine power when my shields or weapons are down.

All in All

Is FTL a great game?  Maybe not.  It has a pretty limited scope, which gives it a very niche appeal.  But it fills that niche very well.  It's a great example of making a compelling game for a limited audience, and not charging an arm and a leg for it.  I think that's exactly the direction developers should be moving in, especially for premium games.

Good breaks, Bad breaks, Bathroom breaks

Good Breaks

Ten years ago "mini-games" was an inescapable term in the industry.  Every major proposal had to include some number of non-standard gameplay elements sprinkled throughout your AAA game design.  Training mini-games in Fight Night, rail-shooter levels in Turok, gambling in Shenmue - mini-games were everywhere.

This always seemed like a poor mandate to me - as if we developers needed to pace out the main game experience because our players were too single-minded to vary their experience on their own.  When playing a game I prefer to set my own pace - and switch to other activities periodically if my attention wanes.  Pausing my latest exploration in FTL to peruse new messages on some forums lets me return to my experience refreshed.

But forcing breaks within the game means that the experience almost always suffers.  If the mandatory break comes when I'm ready for a break then the game has effectively done nothing.  If the mandatory break comes when I still want to focus on the primary activity - then I feel frustration.  This can be mitigated somewhat by ensuring that the breaks are as "good" as possible - that they make sense within the context of the game, that I have some control (or at least warning) about when they will come up (and end!) and that they reinforce the main game rather than detract from it.

Bad Breaks

"Bad" breaks, on the other hand, are always failures regardless of when they come into view.  A bad break makes it difficult for me to return to the main game, because it broke my interest.  Network television commercials are often bad breaks - watching the same shows via internet streaming services has demonstrated that the shows work better without those breaks.  Saturday Night Live was an early innovator in reducing the negative impact of commercial breaks - because some of the commercials were actually just pre-recorded segments of the show.  That keeps the regular commercials more in tune with the show - turns some of the bad breaks into good breaks.

But there is another type of break - it is possible to provide players with a break when they wouldn't take one on their own, but after taking the break they appreciate the respite.  These are very hard to gauge because they often focus on physical factors like fatigue or eye-strain, which don't reliably occur at specific points in the game experience.  But when done well, these breaks provide the "bathroom break effect."

Bathroom Breaks

The great thing about a "bathroom break" is that it is all about removing you from your primary context, and providing you with a secondary, temporary context.  You're not just avoiding one activity - you are actively focused on another, essential, activity.

The trick here is the word "essential".  Inventory tetris isn't essential - neither are Diablo town-trips.  (As evidenced by the amazing "dog" mechanic in Torchlight!)  Perhaps the best example I've seen of a consistently essential activity was in the brutally hard DS game Henry Hatsworth in the puzzling adventure.  This comes close to the dreaded "pat your head & rub your tummy" problem evident in games like The World Ends with You, but it manages to just barely skirt by on charm and integration.

The concept of breaks has faded in the past 3 years, largely because the market has become more focused on bite-sized games instead of huge epic time-sinks.  But I think the lessons of good break design still hold - let your players manage their breaks as much as possible, by providing them with a variety of meaningful break options.

How to use a Western Toilet

For a long time now, I've wanted to take a trip to India. I've spent lots of time preparing myself and my kids for this theoretical trip, and one element of that has been learning how to use a squat toilet. That's not something there is a lot of literature about, which initially surprised me. Then again, people tend to learn how to use their local style of toilet when they are quite young - before they can read. It's also a topic which is probably a bit awkward to talk about for adults - so on second thought maybe it's not surprising that there is a bit of a dearth of literature on the subject.

Part of an education in design is learning to express yourself clearly, and I find that it is a useful exercise to explain something you understand without language. For all these reasons, I've decided to write a formal design document explaining how to use a standard American toilet.

Components of a toilet

The toilet is made up of six external parts:

The bowl, the tank, the lid, the seat, the cover, and the flush apparatus.

The Flushing Apparatus

The flushing apparatus varies the most from toilet to toilet - many toilets use a hinged metal handle attached to the front or side of the tank, but some use a button, a pull chain, or a motion detector. It is not unusual for the precise mechanism to be unfamiliar or unclear, so don't be afraid to experiment. Regardless of the mechanism, once a flush is initiated it should be very obvious.

The Tank

The second element which varies most is the tank. Most home toilets use a rectangular tank affixed directly above the rear of the bowl - such that a person sitting on the toilet might lean back on it.
However some tanks are placed higher on the wall, or even suspended from the ceiling. Some commercial locations do not have a tank at all - they use pressurized water, instead of relying on gravity to force the water into the bowl.

The Cover

The cover is a removable top panel which allows easy access to the inside of the tank.  This allows repairs to be made to the moving components of the flush apparatus.  In most cases this cover (like the tank and bowl) is made out of solid ceramic - so it is extremely heavy.

The Bowl

The bowl is the largest element of the toilet - it is where everything ends up before you flush.  Most toilets keep between 1-2 gallons of clean water in the bowl at all times, but some toilets remain dry between uses.  The bowl also provides the structural strength which makes the toilet capable of supporting your weight during use.  Cleaning the toilet bowl requires coming into contact with human waste, which most people find quite distasteful.  The constant flushing keeps the bowl fairly clean, but regular scrubbing is still required.  A clean toilet bowl is an excellent indicator of a tidy household.

The Lid

The lid covers the bowl, preventing vapors from spreading to the rest of the room.  This is lifted before each use, and typically closed after each use.  Some people feel that leaving the lid up, or even removing the lid entirely, increases efficiency by removing two unnecessary steps from the process.  Unfortunately for the rest of us, even one instance of a missing lid combined with a failure to flush can create an environment of very unpleasant odors.

The Seat

The toilet seat sits between the lid and the bowl - and provides a place for users to sit while using the toilet.  Seats are separate pieces from the bowl in order to facilitate easier cleaning of both components - seats swing up to allow access to the wider top of the bowl, and to the underside of the seat.  It is considered polite for men who prefer to urinate standing up to lift the seat before doing so - to eliminate any chance of urine landing where other people sit.  If you do this it is essential that you then close the seat afterward - building a good habit of always closing the lid will ensure that you do so.  It is an infrequent - but all too memorable - occurence for someone to absent-mindedly sit down on a toilet with the seat left up - causing them to fall into the bowl.

Two final steps

Toilet paper is typically kept in easy reach of the toilet.  After using the paper to clean yourself, you need to wash your hands briefly with soap and hot water.  Toilet paper is designed to dissolve quickly when wet - you throw it into the bowl before flushing.  This also means that toilet paper is NOT a barrier to germs and does NOT prevent germs from getting on your hands.  Some misguided people will use excessive amounts of toilet paper to wrap their hands - but no amount of excess toilet paper can relieve you of the requirement to wash with soap and water afterwards.  Toilet paper is meant to wipe away excess waste, not keep your hands clean.  If you do not use the sink after flushing the toilet, you are embarrassing yourself and creating a health hazard for others.

What Lions (and many humans) don't know.

Physical prowess seems cool.  Everyone daydreams about flipping around like a ninja, or hoisting cars like the Hulk, or leaping over rooftops like Batman.  Humans historically think of predator animals (Hawks, Lions, T-Rex) as being "kings" or optimal examples of animal form.

But, of course, physical prowess is not the best way for an organism to survive.  Intelligence & community are much stronger traits, which is why humans dominate the planet instead of Lions.

I don't think this concept is especially controversial.  People generally agree that community and intelligence are good traits.  But what strikes me as odd is the idea that physical combat - especially "ambush" style combat - is somehow the best, or most pure, or most true determination of worth.  The only real advantage I see to combat is that it has an immediacy that most other forms of conflict resolution lack (except, perhaps, Rock-Paper-Scissors?).  So perhaps this obsession with physical combat is really just impatience - an unreasonable desire for things to be resolved RIGHT NOW.

Tension Maps Revisited

Back in March 2011, Game Developer Magazine published an article of mine which I had titled:

"Tension, Equilibrium, and Structure: A process for identifying low-risk design opportunities"

The editors didn't think that was punchy enough (or it was too long) because when the article was published the title had become "Tension Maps."  Well, here we are in January of 2011, and the article has been re-published on gamasutra.

I won't quibble over a bit of editorial title-changing, but somehow the overall point of the article seems to be missed by many people.  I spend 60% of it giving a long-winded specific example of how to build a Tension Map, but it's not entirely clear what I mean for designers to DO with it.  Tension Maps are not simply an exercise for breaking down a game into component systems for analysis - they are meant to be a risk-assessing feature for the purposes of production control and development.

What I mean and don't mean

The reason I started using Tension Maps in my own work was that I had too many feature discussions which ran like this:

Producer: "We're running short on time - we need to cut features.  Anyone have any suggestions?"

Me: "I think we cut one of the playable characters.  We haven't built the assets yet, and it will save us a bunch of time tweaking the main storyline to fit with her."

Producer: "Hmmm... but our publisher says that people really want to see that character in the game.  Any other suggestions?"

Programmer: "Well, we could cut one of our 8 locations from the game.  That would save us 12.5% of our location-building time."

Me: "But we've already built all our locations, and if we lose a location we'll have to re-write the story to adjust."

... etc.

The problem with these meetings was that I didn't have an effective lexicon of terms to describe the criteria I wanted to apply to feature review meetings - a measure of how "central" a feature was, how many other systems it touched, and how different would the game be without it?  That's exactly the situation which generated the idea for Tension Maps of systems, as an analog of the force diagrams we drew in Kinematics classes.

This is dramatically more useful for developers than just another exercise in systems-mapping (or mindmapping, if you're of that flavor) because a systems-map doesn't differentiate between an important system and an unimportant system.  

Multi-Dimensional Decision Making

Today I listened to a really great podcast from three moves ahead featuring Brian Reynolds and Soren Johnson - talking about Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.  I consider SMAC and Civ 4 to be two of the very best video games ever created, so it was sort of a thrill to have the two lead designers of those games discussing the mechanical differences and design inspirations for the games.

The best part of SMAC, they both agreed, was the way that all of your strategic choices were contextualized within the game fiction.  Interestingly for me, this contextualization was actually a fairly late addition to the game - it started as a very dry numbers-crunching economy & warfare sim.  Strategy games are generally economically focused, so it's interesting that the more that fact is obscured the better the games seem to be...

SMAC had 7 really strong "Faction Leaders" who each had a very strong agenda.  This agenda naturally pits some leaders against one another:

Gaians - Ecologically focused.

Morgans - Industry focused.

Believers - Faith focused.

University - Science focused.

Spartans - Military & Police focused.

Hive - Industry focused.  (Also focused on population increase, but with a pro-slavery flavor)

Peacekeepers - Human Rights focused.

Each leader had certain advantages, represented by game bonuses and penalties.  The believers get +25% attack, for example, while the Hive get +10% Industry.  These unique attributes naturally led each faction into certain dominant strategies - the Peacekeepers really wanted to get the Council voting regularly, so their double votes could come into play.  The Spartans really wanted to find a neighbor to dominate with their military.  The University wanted to isolate themselves and research in peace.

On top of all of this, there was the really great "build your government" layer, in which players could select various economic, social, and governmental systems to mix and match.  Each faction had a certain appreciation or disdain for each policy - for example Morgan loved "Free Economy" while the Spartans loved "Power" as a diplomatic policy.  If you wanted to keep friendly with a particular faction, you needed to adjust your social programs to please them.

Getting to the point...

And now I can finally get to the point of all this - which is that what really made all of these systems so excellent was the fact that each decision you made had several significant decisions which were in competition with one another.  For example, if you were near Miriam and needed to appease her, you had to turn down your research systems.  That meant you weren't getting much research done - which forced you to actually play the game more the way Miriam played the game.  If you ran Free Market to please Morgan, that actually put your society into a different trajectory, which had real consequences down the line for your development.

So your government policy choice was influenced by at least 4 important considerations:

1 - What you wanted to achieve.

2 - What would increase your power in the game (economy, military, political, research)

3 - What would your neighbors think of your choices.

4 - How well you could afford to adopt a different strategy, if necessary.

This last point is especially important - since policy choices were so significant, you were motivated to change them fairly often.  It simply wasn't viable to set your economy to Free Market and just leave it there for the entire game.  You needed to adapt to a changing situation, and so you needed a Whole Game Strategy which allowed for variation.  It wasn't so much a decision about IF you would run a particular social engineering choice as WHEN you would run it.  This creates a positive feedback loop with your choices - each choice is difficult, but needs to be re-evaluated frequently.

Binary Decisions

Many games talk about "decision points" when they talk about a splitting path, or a small handful of options available to a player.  These sort of choices often don't really matter to players, because after you make them you can just forget about them.  Even games which claim that your choices matter (Deus Ex, Infamous) really just alter a few cutscenes or repackage some abilities to suit the game fiction of choice.  These choices are just random decisions to make - you can pretty much flip a coin for all the significance they have.

But SMAC gave you decisions which constantly begged for re-evaluation.  The University would call up and say "We've got laser tanks here, and we're not sure if we should drive them towards you or the Spartans.  What's your current policy on the freedom of information, hm?"  But you're building some expensive unit prototypes, and you need to keep up your current economic policy for a few more turns to get them out at your full discount - so your military, research, diplomatic, and industrial concerns are all at odds with one another.

Failure is a big part of most games, but in many cases failure seems arbitrary.  Giving players multi-dimensional choices allows them to create user-stories about why they failed (it doesn't matter if these stories are accurate or not) which gives them a greater sense of involvement & control in the play of their game.

Who is your audience? A musing on demographic swings.

In 2009 "Farmville" was pretty much the only topic of discussion at GDC.  That March pretty much cemented what many people were already saying - that free-to-play was a huge deal, and that new economic models were set to completely eclipse the established models.  In 2010 less than 10% of all money being invested in the game space was directed toward new console development.  Zynga just had a rather successful IPO, but some serious cracks are already showing in the free-to-play armor.

Who is your audience?

A huge part of Zynga's success (and Facebook's success) is the fact that traditional non-gamers (we call these people "casual" players) played in droves, and paid money to the developers.  Social games like Farmville used a great hook to pull whole communities of players in and keep them engaged.  Then came Frontierville, Cityville, Adventureland... each building on that same recipe for success.

Except that they didn't exactly.

Oh, sure the numbers looked good.  Zynga told us that sales were no longer important - what was important was # of new players, and the retention %.  But Zynga has already become a victim of their own runaway success.  If you have 10,000,000 players on your social game, where do you find new audience?  Do you localize and expand into markets in China and India?  No - Zynga just made more 'ville games which appealed to roughly the same segment of the population as Farmville - and so although each new game boasted higher player numbers and faster retentions, the total number of players started to creep downwards.

As this process expands, and new games continue to be released, fragmentation happens at an accelerated rate.  It's the same trend we've seen in the MMO bubble - some early success, some early adopters share in that success, and then suddenly the game is reduced to maybe 1 major game, and some fringe players.

So why are we falling for this again?  Isn't this just standard economic theory about market saturation?  Well no - the problem here is the internet itself.  The internet dramatically increases a developer's connection to customers, but it also speeds up market saturation, and I believe that we were unprepared for that.

Iteration, Feedback, and Savvy

A quicker development cycle and faster iteration times allows developers to tune their products like never before - but it also means that customers can exhaust those products of value at an accelerated rate.  Part of the reason early console players would spend hundreds of hours on the same game was because of the fact that getting another game - any other game - was hard.  But now, I have hundreds of unplayed games at my fingertips all day, every day.  I'm not captive at all, which means I can afford to be capricious in my behaviors.

This doesn't happen with paid goods, or limited duration services.  It's the combination of a focus on player retention and the market saturation which is creating an impossible challenge for developers trying to cash in on the Zynga-bonanza.  That revenue stream is tapped out.  Yes, lots of people will still be making millions on Facebook, but it won't be like Zynga - because that market no longer exists.

Who is your audience? A musing on demographic swings.

In 2009 "Farmville" was pretty much the only topic of discussion at GDC.  That March pretty much cemented what many people were already saying - that free-to-play was a huge deal, and that new economic models were set to completely eclipse the established models.  In 2010 less than 10% of all money being invested in the game space was directed toward new console development.  Zynga just had a rather successful IPO, but some serious cracks are already showing in the free-to-play armor.

Who is your audience?

A huge part of Zynga's success (and Facebook's success) is the fact that traditional non-gamers (we call these people "casual" players) played in droves, and paid money to the developers.  Social games like Farmville used a great hook to pull whole communities of players in and keep them engaged.  Then came Frontierville, Cityville, Adventureland... each building on that same recipe for success.

Except that they didn't exactly.

Oh, sure the numbers looked good.  Zynga told us that sales were no longer important - what was important was # of new players, and the retention %.  But Zynga has already become a victim of their own runaway success.  If you have 10,000,000 players on your social game, where do you find new audience?  Do you localize and expand into markets in China and India?  No - Zynga just made more 'ville games which appealed to roughly the same segment of the population as Farmville - and so although each new game boasted higher player numbers and faster retentions, the total number of players started to creep downwards.

As this process expands, and new games continue to be released, fragmentation happens at an accelerated rate.  It's the same trend we've seen in the MMO bubble - some early success, some early adopters share in that success, and then suddenly the game is reduced to maybe 1 major game, and some fringe players.

So why are we falling for this again?  Isn't this just standard economic theory about market saturation?  Well no - the problem here is the internet itself.  The internet dramatically increases a developer's connection to customers, but it also speeds up market saturation, and I believe that we were unprepared for that.

Iteration, Feedback, and Savvy

A quicker development cycle and faster iteration times allows developers to tune their products like never before - but it also means that customers can exhaust those products of value at an accelerated rate.  Part of the reason early console players would spend hundreds of hours on the same game was because of the fact that getting another game - any other game - was hard.  But now, I have hundreds of unplayed games at my fingertips all day, every day.  I'm not captive at all, which means I can afford to be capricious in my behaviors.

This doesn't happen with paid goods, or limited duration services.  It's the combination of a focus on player retention and the market saturation which is creating an impossible challenge for developers trying to cash in on the Zynga-bonanza.  That revenue stream is tapped out.  Yes, lots of people will still be making millions on Facebook, but it won't be like Zynga - because that market no longer exists.