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[Column] General: 2015: An Eventful Year for Zynga
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
Those of you who follow me back at my home, MMO Fallout, will be aware that I’ve been paying special attention to recent happenings over at Zynga. To put the news as short as I can: Zynga is replacing their unpopular CEO with an unpopular ex-CEO, and their investors are not happy.
Read more of Connor Wack's 2015 - An Eventful Year for Zynga.
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Comments
funny how such an great article has no comment yet. ty for this article. don mattrick destroyed the xbox 360 from 2010 onwards, where really no new titles came out and the focus on kinect and stuff happened. the sad climax was the garbage announcement of the xbone.
what i really dont understand is the following: how on earth can 1 guy nearly destroy xbox and then get money compensation (i guess), switching to zynga and doing worse than the desastrous former ceo? guess what? he gets again a huge money compensation i guess.
how on earth are such dumb people allowed to suck money, yet here we are working daily for so little money. fuck him and everybody who allows such people to have might.
I had to google "zynga" to find out what it was. I don't play any of their games so I wasn't familiar.
"Luckily I always come prepared with graphs."
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Also well informed well written article. Great journalism, wish we had more quality articles like this on MMORPG.com
Healing the world since 2005
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Really nice article.
I was one to follow Zynga closely back in 2012-2013, mainly interested in their "successful" use of the freemium model (which was quite innovative back then).
In my eyes, that specific market suffered from lack of innovative gameplay (much like the Themepark MMO genre 2-5 years ago).
When I first played Themepark MMOs, I was having a blast. But when you play through the same gameplay systems in other games, it does get boring. By the time I played through my 5th Themepark, I was still kind of having fun, but any sense of amazement was gone. The only thing that drove my interest were the unique settings.
With Themepark MMOs 5 years ago, the subscription model was still very common in the west. As a result, it took some investment to try a new game. Even as someone who tried many games, it took me a while to hop between the Themepark ones.
Applied to Zynga's market, all of their games (and their competitors' games) are:
Zynga and everything with it is just a laughing stock now.
Remember when one of these Zynga CEO's got up infront of a game developers conference and called everybody stupid and that Zynga was the future of all games or some shit?
Nobody cares bro! Yeah the dumb facebook games rake in some dough but nobody felt like getting lectured by this dip shit. Look at Zynga now. It all seemed like luck when you look how dysfunctional the company is.
I haven't payed any attention to zynga since I got it blocked from my feed years ago. Somehow their user abusive slash and burn strategy and subsequent financial freefall doesn't surprise me.
I guess we'll see what happens next.
Lost my mind, now trying to lose yours...
Zynga's big factor for success in the early days was lack of competition, and the inability to compete on any meaningful platform is a big part of what caused their downfall. The town I grew up in had one Italian restaurant. It wasn't successful because of the amazing food.
I think you're referring to GDC 2010 where Farmville's Bill Mooney got booed and heckled by some of the crowd because he turned an award acceptance speech into a pitch for indie devs to submit their resumes to Zynga.The abusive culture extends to their acquisitions as well. I forgot about the OMGPOP CEO trashing an ex-employee on Twitter following the acquisition, calling him the weakest and saying good riddance. OMGPOP, as you may know, crashed in popularity once Zynga acquired it and the studio shut down a year later to the loss of about $80 million.
http://i.imgur.com/Dob8n.jpg
Well... If nothing else i think we should thank companies like Zynga for opening up the market to people who otherwise never would have touched a "videogame". But as always hubris reaps it´s victims. It is the same thing that Ubisoft and EA saw... only they had a diverse portfolio that could absorb blows like the Sim City crash or well.. Ubisoft being Ubisoft.
Zynga had non of that and i think that they need to pretty much rebrand them self to get back off the ground.
This have been a good conversation
I hate them for that very reason...they brought in "users" and painted them as gamers and then you get the whole gamer gate bullshit. I see a direct correllation between Zynga and this whole GamerGate stuff. Before then, there was POGO.com , Kingfish, MSN games, for casuals but they were never really counted as gamers. But along comes FB and Zynga, and all of a sudden, all these "users" are now classified as gamers...why?...because they're users and easily suckered to the tune of billions. Which prompts some sanctimonious arses to say Gamers are dead and start the whole flamefest off because TBH, dev houses dont want to make games for gamers anymore, they want to make games for suckers, aka whales and the rest of you can piss off.
Xbox was destroyed only in your mind my friend. They are doing fine and they are going nowhere any time soon. No they haven't beaten the playstation yet but if you haven't noticed all the PC games are Xbox controller compatible and not playstation. So they have quite the edge that Sony does not and could very well take the market completely.
The husk of Zynga is still a target of opportunity for the investor vultures. To pick apart its remaining carrion (ie IP brands) by breaking up the company in an auction or what not. Management has been DOA for a long while, so anyone putting money in now to the company must really have a secret weapon.
Best just to separate the high achiever successful brands to other developers / publishers that can walk and chew gum at the same time. Zynga unfortunately seems like a ghost of its former self looking like an addict for its next hit.
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The Older Gamers