Similar: abuses employees in profane tirades, has nice cafeterias
Different: APPL valued at a bit more than ZNGA, not literally a force of pure evil*
* unless you’re Richard Stallman

In case you’re wondering why Mark Pincus of Zynga is compared to Steve Jobs so much (maybe you hear voices in your head, I won’t judge) Slate publishes a four part ‘interview’ with Pincus where Jacob Weisberg answers that burning question, while also remarking on just how awesome Pincus is, and how he can’t understand why people would ever have a poor opinion of the company. Pincus replies that it’s really just because he’s too busy
being concentrated awesome to care about what the peasantry thinks.

Stay tuned for Part II: “Gameplay is Overrated” and Part III: “The Stock Market is Gnarly”!

Stock market’s kinda rough today.

Zynga loses over a third of its value in one day after a disastrous earnings call.

But take heart! Zynga has a plan. Can you guess what it is?

Hint: if you’re going to go evil, go full metal evil.

“Zynga is not a very subtle company, are they?” — anonymous

Eric Schiermeyer, a co-founder of Zynga, an online game company and maker of huge hits like FarmVille, has said he has helped addict millions of people to dopamine, a neurochemical that has been shown to be released by pleasurable activities, including video game playing, but also is understood to play a major role in the cycle of addiction.

But what he said he believed was that people already craved dopamine and that Silicon Valley was no more responsible for creating irresistible technologies than, say, fast-food restaurants were responsible for making food with such wide appeal.

“They’d say: ‘Do we have any responsibility for the fact people are getting fat?’ Most people would say ‘no,’ ” said Mr. Schiermeyer. He added: “Given that we’re human, we already want dopamine.”

Eric Schiermeyer
Part Of The Problem, Zynga
From a New York Times article about addictive technology

In case earlier stories about the Facebook game maker didn’t turn Mark Pincus into enough of a moustache-twirling villain from a silent movie, this Wall Street Journal story should finish the job adeptly.

Citing industry sources, The Wall Street Journal reported today that Zynga CEO Mark Pincus, along with his top executives, decided last year as they were preparing for an initial public offering (IPO) that they had given out too much stock to employees. But rather than accept that reality, the executives reportedly tried a different tactic: demand employees give back not-yet-vested stock or face termination.

 

In order to determine which employees would be asked to give stock back, Pincus and his executives tried to pinpoint workers whose contributions to Zynga–in the execs’ eyes–didn’t necessarily justify the potential cash windfall they could receive when the company went public, the Journal claims.

Or on the other hand, maybe Pincus was doing his guys a solid by, uh, taking away their options.

But this isn’t Major League Baseball, where the Boston Red Sox are stuck paying Carl Crawford $20 million per year even if he proves no better than a backup. It’s a non-unionized startup, where the CEO is well within his rights to simply fire an under-performing employee (and recover unvested options). In fact, that’s what happens at most companies. The difference at Zynga is that Pincus seems intent on retaining talent, even if that talent either didn’t live up to initial expectations or didn’t adequately match up to the changing needs of a fast-growing company.

Yeah, I don’t think so.

"YOU! STOP CREATING THINGS! I DON'T PAY YOU TO BE PRODUCTIVE!"

An article in this week’s SF Weekly asks the burning question: is Farmville’s Zynga merely evil, or a black hole of vile darkness from which no ethics can escape?

In light of Zynga’s phenomenal rise, one former senior employee recalls arriving at the company eager to discover what new business practices were driving its success in a market where other popular Web 2.0 ventures struggled to make money. What was Zynga’s secret? Not long after starting work, he got an answer. It came directly from Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus at a meeting. And it wasn’t what he expected.

“I don’t f**king want innovation,” the ex-employee recalls Pincus saying. “You’re not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers.”

Workers at Zynga were fond of joking (albeit half-seriously) that their firm’s unofficial motto was an inversion of Google’s famous “Don’t Be Evil.”

“Zynga’s motto is ‘Do Evil,’” he says. “I would venture to say it is one of the most evil places I’ve run into, from a culture perspective and in its business approach. I’ve tried my best to make sure that friends don’t let friends work at Zynga.”

“We’ve never before seen this kind of deliberate unconcern for the aesthetics of the experience,” says Ian Bogost, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and founding partner of Persuasive Games. He says Zynga’s market-driven approach to the development of simple but addictive applications is “like strip-mining. They don’t really care about the longevity of the form or the experience. … That sort of attitude is the sort of thing you usually hear about from oil companies or pharmaceuticals. You don’t really hear about it in arts and entertainment.”

One of the more common complaints among former Zynga employees is about Pincus’ distaste for original game design and indifference to his company’s products, beyond their ability to make money. “The biggest problem I had with him was that he didn’t know or care about the games being good — the bottom line was the only concern,” a former game designer says. “While I am all for games making money, I like to think there’s some quality there.”

Note to Mr. Pincus: at least no one said anything about your dog.

Edit: Just in case there wasn’t enough moustache-twirling in the house, Gawker brings word of Zynga’s secret whales program!

By setting up a non-refundable, bank-to-bank transfer program, as documented in the Zynga email we obtained and have reproduced below, the company can avoid giving a cut of the revenue to credit card companies and processors. More importantly, the program allows gaming addicts to feed their addictions more conveniently; on Facebook Zynga’s game stores can top out at $50 or $200 in virtual credit at a time, effectively turning away the company’s best customers.

Just as a note: if you spend $500 on Farmville, you might have a problem.