Zynga founder Mark Pincus says “only a master craftsman can spot excellence and be comfortable copying it”

Zynga founder Mark Pincus urges mobile game designers to ignore their egos and just copy what works in his new book.

In a free sample chapter of Life at the Speed of Play, which will be published on June 23, Pincus breaks down his ‘Proven Better New’ framework as “a systematic approach to generating winning products faster”.

It’s a methodology that became “a religion inside Zynga”, he says, and the concept has since been adopted by many other mobile game product teams – including Supercell.

He says the Finnish firm’s debut title Hay Day is a prime example of “Proven, Better (no New)” – as Supercell essentially just made “FarmVille for mobile”.

In the Proven Better New chapter of the book, Pincus sums up the three-step process as below:

= Proven. A product that is already loved by your target audience – the exact features/mechanics (every pixel) that make up the experience.

> Better. What you can improve so that 10 out of 10 users would respond with “Yes!” Be careful— what you think is Better is actually New.

+ New. Your novel idea that’s never been tried with this product and audience. This is the riskiest part, so you want to isolate that idea and test it.

Pincus urges readers to ignore moral concerns over copying others’ work and invokes Steve Jobs’ famous line: “Good artists copy; great artists steal” – which he also notes was effectively stolen from Picasso.

“We all want to be respected by our peers, so our egos hold us back from copying,” he explains. “In my experience, the more junior the product teams, the more they spend cycles trying hard not to copy or even look as if they were copying.”

“We need to get comfortable copying what already works (legally), so we can spend all our time and energy on the novel innovation that actually excites us and our users.”

He continues: “Only a master craftsman can spot excellence and be comfortable copying it. They recognise when something is already excellent and understand that changing anything will just make it worse – and they’re confident in their ability to create something new and innovative that will speak for itself.”

Pincus also ruminates on why, as he puts it, “all New fails.”

That phrase became a maxim within Zynga, he says, which was used “not to discourage innovation, but rather to encourage experimentation and curiosity, rather than presuming success.”

An early manifestation of the ‘Proven Better New’ ethos was right there in Pincus’ first game, Zynga Poker, he says. “We took the Proven table layout and game mechanics from online poker, made it Better by removing the download, and added a New feature, which was real people, often your friends, with their pictures at the table.”

Pincus also notes that at this point he was funding Zynga with $350k of his own money, determined not to “go back to VCs hat in hand” after his experiences with failed social network Tribe.

“Zynga Poker was the antithesis of Tribe,” he continues. “The product was so unambitious and noninnovative that it was embarrassing. It was just a poker game that looked exactly like every other.”

The one ‘New’ feature was showing players’ real identities using their Facebook profile pictures, says Pincus, and the ‘Better’ feature was instant play with no download.

During the making of FarmVille, which Pincus says took just six weeks, he cites titles like Restaurant City, FarmTown, HappyFarm and MyFarm as inspirations. He also recounts that during one of his monthly lunches with Mark Zuckerberg, Pincus and the Facebook founder cooked up a plan to make FarmVille the first game played in the Facebook feed.

It worked; after FarmVille launched on June 19 2009, it hit 1m daily active users in four days, and broke 20m within six months.

To launch later titles CityVille, Pincus says Zynga also lifted many of the innovations from Millionaire City, a game created by the team that became Supercell.

Supercell later returned the favour when making Hay Day, adds Pincus: “One of the most successful examples of Proven Better (no New) came when a team at Supercell created Hay Day, which was essentially FarmVille for mobile.”

He continues: “If you compared the original Hay Day and FarmVille, you would have thought they were the same game. Both featured the same half driveway, the mailbox, and the house with the white picket fence. They even have the same pickup truck – one was red, one was blue.”

“But I’m not complaining. This is a masterclass in Proven Better New!”