Alleged Zynga Insider Shares Dirt On Social Games Developer

Zynga -- the huge developer of social games such as Farmville, Mafia Wars, Words with Friends, and many others -- has been under siege of late with accusations of ripping off other developers. Things aren't going to get easier any time soon, as now someone claiming to be a former software engineer at Zynga has stepped forward to air some more dirty laundry on the company.

Posting on Reddit under the name "mercenary-games," the mystery individual says he quit six months ago and claims that Zynga "treats em like s---," presumably referring to employees. Asked by a Reddit user, "What creepy stuff went on?" mercenary-games provided the following lengthy response:

"Spying on players. Getting intimate gaming data, their habits, their networks, and how to effectively monetize given X. Another issue was skewing gameplay for the sake of profit, example; I actually resorted to BAD MATH, to make the case for making a feature more fun. At the end of one sprint, a QA dude was complaining about the drop rate of a specific item being absurdly insane, and therefore UnFun. I looked at the code, and tweaked some values, gave it back to QA guy, and fun was restored. Product Manager overrides this, goes for unfun, yet more profitable version."

Digging deeper, the would-be whistle-blower said that contract workers get the worst part of the bad situation at Zynga, being treated "like second citizen employees." He added, "They almost have no feedback or say on their work schedule. I've seen people waiting to turn full time, but only spend more time as a contractor because of office politics. Worst of all; they are NOT welcome to company events, they are openly excluded from them. Yet, they want them to work twice as hard as regular full timers."

The anonymous user did also point to some good things happening at Zynga, including an above-average lunch room and arcade machine access, although none of his pros seem related to actual game development. Referencing the recent reports of Zynga ripping off other social game creators, mercenary-games said it is "standard operating procedure here. If you can't buy em, clone em.... They try to choke out the competition by gating all these engines and tech."

Mercenary-games also went into further detail about how Zynga tracks data for its players:

"Internal metrics researchers often give studio wide talks on what trends are going on. They've basically tracked down very popular players and also players who've spent an excess of 10k into the game.

"Zynga often tweaks features to match and maximize for a particular gaming habit. They do this for massive populations of players.

"Players are not aware of this. To me, that's a big brother like issue, someone is measuring and monitoring your behavior intimately, and you don't know how that data is going to be used."

The user also posted an image of a letter of termination from Zynga as an attempt to verify that he's real, but obviously this hasn't been (and almost certainly will not be) confirmed by Zynga in any way, shape, or form. It certainly matches a lot of the worst whisperings we've heard about the company, though, for whatever that's worth.

[via Kotaku]