You select a dish, buy the ingredients for it, and then cook it over a period of time. Sehgal describes his title as an “ultimate cooking and restaurant empire building game.” The player actively participates in cooking dishes for the restaurant and does so in a social way. From one view, it certainly looks like Zynga just cloned the Playfish game.īut Sehgal says that the game really has a different game mechanic at its core. Rival social game maker Playfish had pioneered the food genre on Facebook with a game called Restaurant City. Of course, the team didn’t have to look far for inspiration. Sehgal himself considered himself to be a “web guy, not a game guy.” The team included 25 producers, product managers, game designers, artists and programmers - all from a variety of backgrounds, not just video games. Sehgal led a team that conceptualized how to go after the category of food/restaurant-themed game. Now it has more than 500, counting about 100 contractors. Back then, the company had less than 200 employees. Sehgal, a former casual games creator at MTV Networks, joined San Francisco-based Zynga in April. But his answers are quite relevant to anyone trying to knock Zynga off its perch as the top company in social games. Sehgal didn’t reveal the secret sauce, or playbook, behind the game. We put those questions to Roy Sehgal (right), general manager of Clubhouse Studio, the new Zynga game design studio that built Cafe World in just five months. How does Zynga do it? Will it last? Is the game really that good, or is it spreading rapidly because Zynga can cross promote it to so many of its other game users? While other game makers toil for naught, Zynga makes it look so easy. These numbers are unheard of and they raise a lot of questions.

Games like zynga cafe world