Zynga (who make a number of Facebook games, including FarmVille) CEO Mark Pincus went on press on an NBC Bay Area Sunday morning business TV show, to discuss a few business type things. Specifically the topics surrounding social gaming and his company’s recent bad PR.

The round table discussion started with talk of a video recently found that when taken out of context, shows Pincus admitting to scamming users to generate money. When context is added, it looks the same.

Defending this terrible abuse of his users, Pincus explained that it was all part of a bigger point he was trying to make to the assembled mass of young entrepreneurs.

The real point that I was making was that as entrepreneurs we ought to try to have profitable services as early as we can so that we can control our destinies and so we can be in a position, as my company was recently, to do the right thing and make the long-term right decisions.

This makes sense from a business perspective. Sadly, at least for me, the argument falls on its arse when you point out that businesses are not soulless entities floating through the aether interacting with virtual customers. They’re real companies manned by real people dealing with real individuals. Morality is engrained in all, and knowing you’re going to profit based on other people being scammed is not good.

Pincus said that it “breaks my heart when I hear that people feel like they were scammed in any way”. The follow up question to that quote was about the lawsuit being brought against them by an unfortunate player who was billed hundreds of dollars (Zynga is estimated to be worth hundreds of millions), something that I’m sure broke his heart to hear about. He repeated that Zynga and Facebook think the lawsuit has no merit. I guess that makes sense from a buis… never mind.

When talking about the high frequency of social games that are essentially copies of others, he likened it to Guitar Hero and Rock Band: “one of them has The Beatles, I’m not sure which. But I could play either one, they have the exact same mechanics”. Which is a fair analogy. His defence of the more extreme copying that goes on within social gaming continued by pointing out that they can’t all be copies, because some are doing better than others.

Another noteworthy chat included the panel commenting on how social games are far less addictive than Xbox games because you only spend a few minutes every day playing games like FarmVille, as opposed to the several hours we addicted teens spend gaming.

The full interview can be watched online, and if you’re interested in hurumph business hurumph then it’s worth a watch.

via: TechCrunch