WIRED:With hundreds of millions of happy customers, should a firm care what the neighbours think?

THERE ARE many people in Silicon Valley who really don’t like Zynga. That’s odd because outside the Valley, millions of people love the company – or at least their more famous products, Facebook games like FarmVille, Mafia Wars and PetVille. Over 200 million people dabble with its products every month. The company also makes a great deal of money, which is usually the way to warm the hearts in the Bay Area: according to the Inside Network, its revenue is set to approach $500 million this year. It has over a thousand employees, including two offices in the Valley, and a sizeable presence in Dublin.

What’s not to like? Perhaps part of the complaint is Zynga’s products are too likeable. Game developers at the opinionated but influential Game Developers Conference here in March railed against Zynga’s gaming philosophy, when they won one of the conference’s key awards. When the general manager for FarmVille, Bill Mooney, called on stage for game developers to come work at Zynga, he was booed. One even shouted, “But you don’t make games!”

That’s what you might call the gamer insider critique of Zynga: that whatever it is that makes their offerings popular and profitable, it isn’t really gaming. Critics characterise the flagship Zynga products as challenge-free time-occupiers that merely encourage their users to compulsively complete tasks, and then commandeer friends to help them. Gamer critic Ian Bogost even invented an actual Facebook game of his own, an embodied criticism of Zynga’s approach called Cow Clicker.

In Cow Clicker, you get a cow. You can click on it. In six hours, you click it again. Clicking earns you clicks, but you can also buy “premium” cows, and buy your way out of the six-hour time delay by spending more money. You can also publish stories about your cow to the rest of your friends, to encourage them to become cow clickers too.

As a satire of the Zynga way, it’s pretty damning. But if people enjoy the product, might it not be a little elitist?

It has to be said bad feeling toward Zynga doesn’t seem to be exclusively from the gamer elite. When Zynga chief executive Mark Pincus joined Steve Jobs for one of his famous keynotes at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, he faced audience boos just for mentioning FarmVille (no one ever boos Steve’s keynotes).

Some have accused the company of imitating other popular games that preceded it. But imitation is a perfectly acceptable technique in the Valley. From the start, Pincus pushed Zynga to make revenue very quickly, including accepting deals where players signed up for credit cards in order to earn in-game tokens. When Pincus gave a speech to other start-up entrepreneurs he admitted that he “did every horrible thing in the book. . . just to get revenues right away”, and was slammed for it by Valley-watcher Michael Arrington. But making money isn’t a moral crime in the Valley either.

I think all of these things combine to turn the average Silicon Valley inhabitant against Zynga, in public at least. My own theory, though, is that it’s not what Zynga does that gets them unfavourable internal reviews: it’s what it lacks.

Almost every company that gets the glowing praise in the Valley, has some element of a “Great Work” about it. You can’t just be money-grubbing. You have to veil or justify that avarice with a wider, more socially inspiring project. Apple makes beautiful products; Google organises the world’s information; Mozilla frees the web; Wikipedia unlocks knowledge; Oracle . . . well, even Oracle mutters about innovation between making sales.

For local acceptance, Zynga needs a mission and an image beyond getting people to click the next cow. They’ve made some effort to create goodwill. Last year, the company took a leaf out of Google’s book, and started zynga.org, a non-profit spin-off that uses in-game sales to fund charities in Haiti and, closer to home, for a San Francisco animal welfare charity.

Really, though, should they even bother? When you have hundreds of millions of happy customers across the world, who cares what your neighbours think?

Perhaps. Having others waiting for you to fail can be an incredible inspiration to show them up, prove them wrong, and beat them all at the real game of business survival. But for a sector that prides itself on its rationality, a lot of what determines success here is image. About the most persistent critique of Zynga is that its central business of Facebook gaming is a gimmick, a temporary boom that will vanish as soon as the next blockbuster games come along. Zynga’s investors, which include Google and Softbank, clearly do not think so.

But that pressure from behind to prove yourself with every launch, and the wind of opinion waiting to beat you down when you waver even for a moment, is a hard combination to beat.

Zynga is the master at getting Facebook users to buy love. It may be the first company to show you can’t simply buy the love of the Valley’s coders, critics and entrepreneurs.