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Zynga Shuts Down 'Draw Something' Creator OMGPOP After Spending $200M to Acquire It
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Wow how would you like to be one of their shareholders?
Kinda like Cisco buying PureVideo for like $1B and shutting it down a year and a half later.
" Gee, we failed to realize how good the cameras were going to be in phones", sorry.
Business ineptitude is amazing.
Kinda like Cisco buying PureVideo for like $1B and shutting it down a year and a half later.
" Gee, we failed to realize how good the cameras were going to be in phones", sorry.
Business ineptitude is amazing.
Angry birds have one advantage over all other games - people play it while they're on the toilet. And since everybody has to use a toilet at some point of the day, those birds will be flying like **** to the toilet.
And yes, i also hate Zynga and i dont rly know why. Hated them since they started annoying me with all the games on facebook. Also why i hate them is that couple of years ago a really smart and fun game called "Drop7" came out. It was nice and free, until Zynga bought it, put the price of it to more than 2$ and left it as it was without any updates. And now it just sits there in Apple and google play store, not updated to match bigger screens (its was made for the iPhone 1 and it still has the same resolution) and its really sad all together. Whatever they touch becomes poop.
These guys are the EA of social games. Buy a company for its licenses, then shut it down and churn out crap sequels to the franchises, devaluing the purchased companies name rather than your own.
Mobile games, the most fickle industry.
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This is one of those things that makes no sense at all to me. How long do you spend on a toilet to be able to fit in a round of Angry Birds? Even if you have time, why play a game?
Heh, I just don't see the appeal at all!
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This is one of those things that makes no sense at all to me. How long do you spend on a toilet to be able to fit in a round of Angry Birds? Even if you have time, why play a game?
Heh, I just don't see the appeal at all!
People have been saying exactly that about EA for years, sadly Zynga is likely to survive to become a big player by using the exact business model EA has been using for years, Buy a company that's doing well, has good franchises in its position, fire everyone, and churn out crap products using the goodwill the company built up before you bought it, devalue its name, move on to purchase another new company to devalue.
Unless of course EA by Zynga at some point..
Their business modes was to bac the "EA" of mobile and social. Whatever anybody else had, they had to have a copy too. That way you never leave Zynga's servers. I'd say it worked well.
What we are seeing now is the first real growing pains of the company. This is where the IPO investors push the remaining founders out.., while the founders are scrambling to save the ship. The Guys on the ship at IPO will then sell all their shares to EA or another big player and the company get assimilated.
Not in terms of money if you look at Top Grossing. Clash of Clans, Candy Crush Saga and Hay Day have been absolutely dominating for months now, plus Hobbit/Simpsons. Angry Birds only makes a short blip every time a new game is released, kind of like the Lego games. They have done some good brand building though.
It's weird that Zynga is failing in a market that is dominated by the cow-clicking they've been famous for.
I think Draw Something was something that was sustainable, the problem was that they continued to tinker with it and screwed it up.
I know a lot of my friends were ticked off when they changed to the randomness of how many bombs it cost for a new set of words. So instead they would just quit and then reload later to get a new set. The end result is they ended up playing much less and lost interest. Also I really miss the stats from the earlier versions as I found it to be a challenge to see how fast I could guess, or how quick I could draw a picture that my friends could correctly guess etc.
I know a lot of my friends were ticked off when they changed to the randomness of how many bombs it cost for a new set of words. So instead they would just quit and then reload later to get a new set. The end result is they ended up playing much less and lost interest. Also I really miss the stats from the earlier versions as I found it to be a challenge to see how fast I could guess, or how quick I could draw a picture that my friends could correctly guess etc.
I read an AMA from a former employee on Reddit and people didn't see it coming but severance packages were quite handsome and included healthcare.
Wait.. am I missing something here? Perhaps I'm ignorant or didn't read this properly but the purpose of acquiring the company was just to shut it down?
Damn, talk about going after your competition.
Wait! I just solved Apple's problem! Acquire Samsung then kill it off! (ready to get flamed for that by everyone w/o a sense of humor).
Damn, talk about going after your competition.
Wait! I just solved Apple's problem! Acquire Samsung then kill it off!
(ready to get flamed for that by everyone w/o a sense of humor).
Wait.. am I missing something here? Perhaps I'm ignorant or didn't read this properly but the purpose of acquiring the company was just to shut it down?
Closing them down wasn't the intention. They bought them hoping to make a profit. At the time of the acquisition, OMGPOP was the fastest growing app in history with 15 million users in just the first 3 months of it's release. Zynga bought them at that point and that same month they lost 1/3 of their users (5 million). From there it continued to lose users. It's not a game I can see people playing forever.
Anyone that bought Zynga was an idiot. Their IPO was grossly overvalued and had nowhere to go but down. The games they make are the kind of thing that will only attract users in the short term. Farmville, Words With Friends, Mafia Wars..... All games made to be played for a week or two then thrown aside. They somewhat understood that which is why they worked on so many games at a time hoping to have another game for their users when they got bored with the last one after a couple weeks. The problem is that kind of growth and release schedule just isn't sustainable. There is also a limit to how many stupid little games people will play. Few will spend years going from game to game to game.
Their other issue is that the majority of their revenue comes from their Facebook games. This is a bad business model in that it ties you to another company and makes them totally dependent on Facebook. They had to give a portion of their profits to Facebook for using the platform (and having access to all of their users). Should Facebook tomorrow decide to cut them off, they're f'd. You really don't want your company to be dependent on another company like that.
Ugh, I do not get that "game". I got bored of it within a few seconds of starting lol. Bioshock Infinite, it's not :-D