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Zynga Shuts Down OMGPOP One Year After Acquiring It For $200M

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Re: Zynga Shuts Down OMGPOP One Year After Acquiring It For $200M

#21

Post by crimsonzagar »

der3k wrote: post #17
ianstallings wrote: post #14

I bet all the execs got well paid for their terrible efforts though and they will slide into new positions of power regardless of their merit. We need to take our industry back from the leeches. The near-sighted execs with nothing but paper accolades and networks of cronies.

Start your own company then and set an example instead of criticizing others. Edit: Thanks for all the upvotes/support. To those who see this as legitimate criticism, really? The OP elaborated on nothing - no constructive criticisms were made. Instead, it just sounds like pure anger and naïveté on my end, alluding to all entrepreneurs trying to make it/who have made it as "leeches" and "near-sighted execs" that have…

Criticism is extremely important for any cos. and its executives. Criticism can potentially save any Zynga from sliding away to nothingness ...

Re: Zynga Shuts Down OMGPOP One Year After Acquiring It For $200M

#22

Post by mherdeg »

Fuzzwah wrote: post #4

Could be good to hear from Dan Porter again. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/167244/Turning_down_Zynga...

I didn't understand your reference. Is the story here that (1) Shay Pierce wrote a column for Gamasutra about why he decided not to work for Zynga after they acquired OMGPOP?

And then (I had to dig in the comments) (2) as that column was circulating, OMGPOP CEO Dan Porter supposedly sent the Twitter message "What's so interesting about success is the number of failures who try to ride on your back. Shay Pierce is just one of many..."?

(The message was supposedly at https://twitter.com/#!/tfadp/status/185901564131688448 but this is a dead link.)

What would you want to hear from Porter now?

Re: Zynga Shuts Down OMGPOP One Year After Acquiring It For $200M

#23

Post by sdoowpilihp »

yesplorer wrote: post #8

I was surprised to hear 3000 people were making those Zynga games. Doing what exactly? Pls I'm genuinely curious. These social games seems so lame to me that I can't think of any reason why someone will even think of building a public company on top of it. You simply cannot meet investors' quarterly demand when your success is built on being "flavour of the month" business model. I don't have anything wrong against Z…

Games take incredible man hours to create, not so much on the engineering side, but on the design side. Copywriting, UI, animation, integration, and game design are all very labor intensive tasks that are performed by highly skilled individuals.

Even on the engineering side, the clients can often take a long time to develop compared to a normal app. As opposed to using Bootstrap or UIFramework, almost all game UI's are "hand rolled" from scratch, and often have odd quirks in their design that can lead to a lot of extra testing. Games in general, whether poorly made games, or well made games, are a huge sink of labor.

Re: Zynga Shuts Down OMGPOP One Year After Acquiring It For $200M

#24

Post by pkfrank »

der3k wrote: post #17
ianstallings wrote: post #14

I bet all the execs got well paid for their terrible efforts though and they will slide into new positions of power regardless of their merit. We need to take our industry back from the leeches. The near-sighted execs with nothing but paper accolades and networks of cronies.

Start your own company then and set an example instead of criticizing others. Edit: Thanks for all the upvotes/support. To those who see this as legitimate criticism, really? The OP elaborated on nothing - no constructive criticisms were made. Instead, it just sounds like pure anger and naïveté on my end, alluding to all entrepreneurs trying to make it/who have made it as "leeches" and "near-sighted execs" that have…

Is it not legitimate to call out piss-poor management and cronyism without also "setting an example?" Does this mean that only people at the helm of $1b+ companies are able to criticize Zynga's pathetic ineptitude?

Not sure what your aggressive reply accomplishes; at least OP has sparked discussion to point out a major flaw and source of Zynga's downfall.

Re: Zynga Shuts Down OMGPOP One Year After Acquiring It For $200M

#26

Post by raheemm »

der3k wrote: post #17
ianstallings wrote: post #14

I bet all the execs got well paid for their terrible efforts though and they will slide into new positions of power regardless of their merit. We need to take our industry back from the leeches. The near-sighted execs with nothing but paper accolades and networks of cronies.

Start your own company then and set an example instead of criticizing others. Edit: Thanks for all the upvotes/support. To those who see this as legitimate criticism, really? The OP elaborated on nothing - no constructive criticisms were made. Instead, it just sounds like pure anger and naïveté on my end, alluding to all entrepreneurs trying to make it/who have made it as "leeches" and "near-sighted execs" that have…

If failure of such magnitude cannot be criticized, then what should be?

Re: Zynga Shuts Down OMGPOP One Year After Acquiring It For $200M

#28

Post by noonat »

pyre wrote: post #5

| "but most of my team had new jobs lined up | by the time they left the building anyway." I've never experienced this. Does this mean that they were already looking, or that they were able to immediately call someone up and get a job offer on-demand? Edit: To be clear, having 'a job lined up' to me means that they already at least have an offer, rather than just a bunch of emails from recruiters and/or people lookin…

Both? I've been in situations where a company implodes like this, and employees at the company are often already being head-hunted by previous employees (who departed during a prior round of lay-offs, or who left of their own volition before the company fell apart) before they are fired.

While it's often something of a surprise when you finally do get the axe, you usually have a sense of impending doom, and a feeling that bad things are going down, before it happens. Projects stop getting traction. Upper management stops caring as much about what you're working on. Everyone becomes very apathetic. You get a rash of invites on LinkedIn, and people start updating their resumes.

So, it's rarely a complete surprise, and people often already have some idea of where they're going to go, or are ready to start looking.

Re: Zynga Shuts Down OMGPOP One Year After Acquiring It For $200M

#29

Post by jgross206 »

pkfrank wrote: post #24
der3k wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Start your own company then and set an example instead of criticizing others. Edit: Thanks for all the upvotes/support. To those who see this as legitimate criticism, really? The OP elaborated on nothing - no constructive criticisms were made. Instead, it just sounds like pure anger and naïveté on my end, alluding to all entrepreneurs trying to make it/who have made it as "leeches" and "near-sighted execs" that have…

Is it not legitimate to call out piss-poor management and cronyism without also "setting an example?" Does this mean that only people at the helm of $1b+ companies are able to criticize Zynga's pathetic ineptitude? Not sure what your aggressive reply accomplishes; at least OP has sparked discussion to point out a major flaw and source of Zynga's downfall.

Talk is cheap. It's very, very easy to criticize from afar when you have no skin in the game.

So, that type of criticism holds very little weight.

Re: Zynga Shuts Down OMGPOP One Year After Acquiring It For $200M

#30

Post by mseebach »

crimsonzagar wrote: post #21
der3k wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Start your own company then and set an example instead of criticizing others. Edit: Thanks for all the upvotes/support. To those who see this as legitimate criticism, really? The OP elaborated on nothing - no constructive criticisms were made. Instead, it just sounds like pure anger and naïveté on my end, alluding to all entrepreneurs trying to make it/who have made it as "leeches" and "near-sighted execs" that have…

Criticism is extremely important for any cos. and its executives. Criticism can potentially save any Zynga from sliding away to nothingness ...

It very charitable to call the GP's rant "criticism".
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