I went to LA and San Francisco these past few weeks before and during fall break. While in San Francisco, I reconnected with my Burning Man friends and I also had the chance to visit Zynga and meeting one of the development directors of Atari’s new social game division. Zynga’s an interesting studio because I kind of get the vibe that while it’s a bright colorful place with a lot of cute dogs running around while their owners work, I don’t get the vibe that people love the games that they’re making. They all seem very tired and exhausted. However, it was a great opportunity to get insight into the workday of social game studios and opportunity to learn about metric definitions such as MAU, DAU, etc.
My friend’s roommate is the development director for Atari’s new social game division and he gave me good insight into the difference between producers and project managers when it comes to social games. He told me that in his experience, PMs usually are involved in a lot of the number crunching and metrics of the games as well as development of their features and that producers usually keep them on schedule and give pushback to let the PMs know what is possible given the actual resources of the team. Definitely got a bunch of useful information while on my trip to San Francisco.
Josh Lee 