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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

#111

Post by CodeCube »

chaz wrote: post #44
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…

They have a few dozen games of varying popularity. The bigger ones need a non-stop flow of new content to be created. Zynga was very good at creating new tasks and items constantly, so there was always something to do and something new to collect. It requires new story lines, artwork, mechanics, localization, and support. Many of the games don't overlap, so each game needs much of its own team. > You simply cannot me…

I just had a funny vision of what their task management system might look like. With managers planting work items, and having to harvest them when the developers are done :P

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

#112

Post by Fuzzwah »

ianstallings wrote: post #84
jgross206 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're right talk is cheap. Here's my latest startup I just built with 5 others: http://www.brabble.com/ https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/brabble/id570281083?mt=8 Edited: 5 others. Forgot the Angel.

On the brabble.com site the menu that pops in from the left pushes the text off the right of my browser window.

http://i.imgur.com/AcmcN53.png

While the site is responsive and making the window small so the left menu goes away fixes it, resizing to any amount larger than that results in some of the text being hidden off the right hand side.

Chrome Version 27.0.1453.94 m

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

#113

Post by robflynn »

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…

It happened to me once. It was a weird surreal experience. This was back in 2001. Company went under while I was flying across the country. I learned about it as I left the plane at my destination.

I ended up accepting a new job offer later that day and rescheduling my return trip. It's still weird for me to think about that.

I definitely got lucky with that one.

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

#114

Post by joezydeco »

georgemcbay wrote: post #56
noonat wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"You get a rash of invites on LinkedIn, and people start updating their resumes." When I was working at chumby industries and it was imploding, it occurred to me that somebody could probably write a really good predictor of imminent company failure by scrapping LinkedIn data and watching for sudden surges of activity from people working at the same company. I'd be surprised if someone (or multiple someones) doesn't a…

Can you subscribe to some kind of 'firehose' feed on LinkedIn that lets you get to that information? Or do you have to be connected to each and every person?

(BTW thanks for Chumby while it lasted. Great product.)

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

#115

Post by ryguytilidie »

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…

There is nothing I dislike more about Silicon Valley than this attitude. Yesterday I saw someone tweet "funny how people who criticize startups usually aren't the ones starting them, might be something to that..."

Or maybe we could realize that this creates a ridiculous logical fallacy on the level of "only god can judge me". Who decided that the only people who can criticize obvious mistakes, shady behavior and being a downright bad person is literally immune to all criticism from 99% of people? How on earth does even a single person think this is passable logic? I get that being a founder is hard, but saying that people literally cannot criticize founders unless they themselves have started a company is absolutely absurd. I cannot believe you and others would lack the self awareness to realize this...

"alluding to all entrepreneurs trying to make it/who have made it as "leeches" and "near-sighted execs" that have "networks of cronies." Stay classy."

Just saw this edit. I really don't know how you managed to read it like that. But yeah, there you go, just create a strawman, tell others to stay classy and smugly believe you're right and you'll never have to actually deal with the idea that you might be wrong.

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

#116

Post by Aco- »

asnyder wrote: post #110
Aco- wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is a good salary for a (full stack) software engineer in NYC with 7 years of experience in the field?

With leadership responsibilities or just individual contributor role?

With leadership responsibilities. Say a medium-to-small sized team, less than 10 people.

One could say the position would be either; Senior Software Engineer or Technical Lead.

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

#117

Post by arindone »

There are too many people commenting on Techcrunch that are almost rooting for Zynga to fail and/or finding it amusing -- there are a still good number of people working at Zynga (with families and livelihoods at stake) and I hope they can right the ship and figure this out.

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

#119

Post by chipsy »

potatolicious wrote: post #100
sdoowpilihp wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More people stopped playing because they got bored. The fickleness of the public is the real danger in games like these, not the idealism of a few (which is a tragedy, as the latter would likely lead to much better games)

Is it really fickleness? Even hardcore games have a relatively short shelf-life. The only real exceptions are games like WoW which have been able to maintain some staying power. For nearly everyone else all the money is made in the first few months after which it disappears into the bargain bin. It seems like social gaming is no different.

Longer-term successes do occur(Minecraft, the Sims, League of Legends are some of the biggest ones from the past decade or so) but the industry tends to quietly ignore them because they don't fit well into established models and formulas. The "blockbuster hit" model itself is a legacy of games being intertwined with the early-adopter consumer tech business, and has lately been challenged by an array of slower-growth stories that are essentially community-oriented service businesses.

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

#120

Post by goofygrin »

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…

I got the axe at a job a few years ago at lunch on a Thursday. By 3pm I had a new gig lined up start the following Monday.

Networking and contacts (and I mean legitimate networking) really play a big part in your overall success.

I'm in a large city, but nothing like NYC or the Valley either.

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