Building Evergreen Mobile Games: How Zynga Keeps Legacy Games Fresh
The hardest thing about running a 10-year-old mobile game isn’t keeping it alive. It’s keeping it relevant.
Zynga games are played by millions of people around the world, many of which have been enjoyed for over a decade. But longevity doesn’t come from simply maintaining what already works. It comes from continuously evolving the experience while protecting the things that made players love it in the first place.
After years of building and operating mobile games, I’ve come to believe that ongoing success is less about finding one big idea and more about building an organization that can repeatedly find, test and scale the right ideas.
There are a few principles we come back to again and again.
Protect What Makes the Game Special
The first rule of evolving an evergreen game is understanding what should not change. Every successful game makes a core promise to its players. For some games, that’s competition. For others, it’s creativity, collection, strategy or simply the satisfaction of solving a puzzle. That core motivation needs to remain recognizable even as everything around it evolves. No two player communities are motivated in exactly the same way.
In Two Dots, for example, many players are motivated by the satisfaction of solving puzzles on their own terms. Some set personal goals around completing levels without boosters, while others focus on mastering increasingly difficult challenges. Dragon City has a very different player motivation. Players collect and raise an enormous variety of dragons, build their own collections and develop teams to compete in battles.
The job of the product team is not to add whatever feature happens to be popular in the market. It’s to understand what players already value and find new ways to deepen that experience. The best new feature is often not the one that changes the game the most. It’s the one that makes the original experience better.
This is also where experienced game teams have an advantage. After years of operating a game, you accumulate enormous amounts of data, but data alone doesn’t tell you why a player cares. A drop in retention is a metric. Understanding what changed in the player’s experience that caused it is the real product challenge.
Keep Experimenting
Once you understand the core of the game, the next challenge is making sure it doesn’t become predictable. This is where live operations and experimentation become critical. A strong cadence of daily, weekly and seasonal events gives players regular reasons to come back, but live-ops is not just about filling a calendar. It’s an opportunity to continuously test new ideas and learn from player behavior.
We frequently test concepts with small cohorts before deciding whether they deserve a larger investment. Sometimes an idea works as expected. Sometimes it needs to change. And sometimes players tell us we’ve discovered something much bigger than we originally intended.
In Two Dots, features such as Scavenger Hunt and Missions started as experiments. Player response was strong enough that both eventually became permanent parts of the experience.
That is one of the advantages of a long-standing game. You don’t need every idea to be right on day one. You have an established community that can help you discover what the game could become next.
However, experimentation also requires discipline. A feature that creates a spike in engagement for two weeks but damages the economy six months later isn’t a successful feature. We look beyond the immediate reaction and ask whether an idea improves the long-term health of the game, including engagement, retention, monetization and ultimately player lifetime value.
The goal isn’t to add more. The goal is to add what matters.
Turn Players Into a Community
Another important part of long-term retention is creating reasons for players to care about more than their own individual progress. Over time, an evergreen game can evolve from a collection of individual routines into a social ecosystem.
FarmVille 2: Country Escape is a good example. Cooperative features gave players opportunities to form alliances, compete together, climb leaderboards and exchange daily gifts. Those mechanics do more than create additional things to do, they create relationships and shared goals. When players feel that other people are counting on them, or that they are working toward something together, the game becomes part of a broader social routine.
For an established team, this also creates an organizational challenge. In a younger game, the focus is often on finding product-market fit. In a mature game, the challenge is building a system that can keep finding new sources of value without constantly reinventing the product. That requires strong product judgment, fast experimentation, deep analytics and the discipline to learn from failures without overreacting to them.
Bring the Outside World Into the Game
As a game gets older, cultural relevance becomes increasingly important. A game can be healthy from a product perspective and still begin to feel disconnected from the world around it. Partnerships can help change that. Sports, entertainment, television and celebrity collaborations can create moments that feel new even inside a game players have known for years.
Top Eleven‘s recent partnership with the Roshn Saudi League, for example, brings recognizable football talent into the game and gives players the opportunity to compete against all 18 Saudi League teams.
We have also seen the power of cross-portfolio collaborations. A recent partnership with CBS’s Survivor 50 enabled five of our long-standing franchises to host synchronized themed events. Bringing recognizable castaways such as Benjamin “Coach” Wade and Rick Devens into the games created a shared moment across multiple communities.
Celebrity partnerships can work in a similar way when there is a genuine connection between the person, the audience and the game. Spades Plus’ partnership with NBA star and Olympic gold medalist Anthony Edwards connected two communities with a natural competitive spirit. Zynga Poker’s Inner Winner campaign with Keegan-Michael Key took a different approach, using his personality to build a campaign around trusting your instincts.
The important point is that partnerships work best when they add something meaningful to the player experience rather than simply putting a famous name on an existing event. For a long-standing game, these moments can act almost like a cultural reset. They give an established game something new to talk about without requiring us to change what the game fundamentally is.
A Great Game is Never Finished
The biggest misconception about evergreen games is that their goal is simply to preserve what already works. In reality, our longest-standing games have to keep earning their place in a player’s life. The market changes, player expectations change, and the reasons people play games change. What worked five years ago cannot be the entire strategy for the next five.
That doesn’t mean constantly reinventing the game. It means continuously finding new ways to make the existing experience more relevant, more engaging and more valuable to players.
This is why I say that the development of a successful game that has stood the test of time is not a finish line. There is no point where you can say, “We’ve figured it out.” The strongest teams keep learning, keep experimenting and keep looking for the next opportunity to create value.
Ultimately, a game isn’t defined by how long it has been around. It’s defined by whether players still have a reason to come back tomorrow.
That is what makes a 10-year success story possible. Not a single launch, feature or marketing campaign, but the ability to continuously evolve alongside the players who have made the game part of their lives.
- Yair Melamed, Senior Vice President, Games
