It was bound to happen -- Now they have to pay a premium for having failed to launch a game in this genre. The model was proven by Newtoy with Words with Friends (which they acquired) and Zynga has since launched a series of others based on the same model (Hanging with Friends etc.). All they need to do is look at the biggest existing markets for board games, console games, etc. and apply it to the WWF model. Pictionary should have been a no-brainer!
Looks Like Zynga Just Bought OMGPOP For $200 Million
21–30 of 160 posts
Re: Looks Like Zynga Just Bought OMGPOP For $200 Million
#22Here's more detail on the price: $180 million plus another $30 million or so in employee retention payments, Im told. Is this typical? It would seem that the employees are getting the shorter end of the stick on this deal.
> Is this typical? It would seem that the employees are getting the shorter end of the stick on this deal.
Which deals do you think they get the long end of the stick?
Re: Looks Like Zynga Just Bought OMGPOP For $200 Million
#23Maybe it will take less than half an hour for a move to be sent to my friend's phone. Hopefully it won't take too long for Zynga to move this game over to the zCloud and fix all the push notification bugs too.
Re: Looks Like Zynga Just Bought OMGPOP For $200 Million
#24Does anyone else question Zynga's growth model? http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2012/03/21/welcome-to-...
Re: Looks Like Zynga Just Bought OMGPOP For $200 Million
#25Is this a talent acquisition or an attempt to capture future revenues of Draw Something?
A $200MM talent acquisition? This meme needs some suppression.
Re: Looks Like Zynga Just Bought OMGPOP For $200 Million
#26Kind of sad. I mean, congratulations to OMGPOP, but I'd really like to see a decent competitor to Zynga out there. Their games are slow, buggy and overly instrusive, but no other company has the kind of traction they do. OMGPOP could have taken the hard route and built themselves up from the success of Draw Something. Oh well.
The hard route? OMGPOP was incorporated in 2006, Zynga in 2007. They've been trying their hand at online games for a while now. This isn't an overnight success.
Re: Looks Like Zynga Just Bought OMGPOP For $200 Million
#27Wow. Charles deserves a whole lot of credit for sticking it out over the last six years - my impression until recently was that they were having a hard time staying open. Congrats to all involved!
Re: Looks Like Zynga Just Bought OMGPOP For $200 Million
#28Here's more detail on the price: $180 million plus another $30 million or so in employee retention payments, Im told. Is this typical? It would seem that the employees are getting the shorter end of the stick on this deal.
Not commenting on this particular situation, but to answer your question in general:
If a company has an IPO, there are no "employee retention payments", so it's better than that :)
Employee retention payments are actually a way to give employees a somewhat better deal than investors, though typically they will be subject to vesting.
Re: Looks Like Zynga Just Bought OMGPOP For $200 Million
#29It doesn't make sense. The article mentions that OMGPOP makes 250 grand a day (that too after after all commissions). that equates to 91.25 million a year. IMHO, $200 million seems like a really small price.
Eventually they're going to run out of people to pay or play. Games don't tend to have a long lifespan, so it probably made sense for them to cash out while they're hot. There's no way they can sustain this rate for 2+ years, which is what they'd need to do in order to make $200 million.
Maybe that's part of why Zynga makes sense. They seem pretty good at transitioning players to new games.
Re: Looks Like Zynga Just Bought OMGPOP For $200 Million
#30That rivals the Heroku for the biggest YC exit so far! (Heroku was ~$212million) OMGPOP would slot in at #2.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AkkhSN3vaY4jdF9...
This likely means YC gets about $3-5million out of the deal, funding even more startups in the future. :)
(edit: Originally wrote Flightcaster for some reason; meant Heroku. Was thinking of Flightcaster earlier today and got confused.)