Wow. 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!
Charles left a year ago.
Looks Like Zynga Just Bought OMGPOP For $200 Million
111–120 of 160 posts
Re: Looks Like Zynga Just Bought OMGPOP For $200 Million
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you think Zynga is a despicable company?
lol, because Zynga stole nearly all of their game ideas from other poeple. Graphics and all. http://www.businessinsider.com/how-zynga-is-just-like-micros... Don't forget Tiny Tower http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2012/01/25/everything... If Mark Pincus was more open about it and said "We're better marketers, business builders, and job creators than the original game creators. Yeah we copy their games, we might…
I guess I heard about that Tiny Tower thing... my takeaway is that nearly everybody borrows ideas from one another. Ideas are cheap, it's the implementation that really matters. Zynga has the means to move on things faster than a lot of competitors.
>>Here's a quote from Mark Pincus, "I am proud of the ethical and fair way that we've built this company.". That's what makes Zynga despicable.
That Mark Pincus claims his company operates in a fair and ethical way (which you disagree with) makes Zynga despicable?
I feel like the Zynga bashing is a product of the feedback loop that is tech news. Just a few years ago, Zynga was lauded as a great company, and Pincus as a great CEO: http://crunchies2010.techcrunch.com/ How quickly popular opinion can change. I wonder if a lot of the hate stems from Zynga's success in a space where many entrepreneurs had invested heavily and ultimately failed.
Re: Looks Like Zynga Just Bought OMGPOP For $200 Million
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
do you have evidence? traditional vc funds don't recycle their money, but yc is not a traditional vc fund
YC raised an $8.25m fund in 2010, and the investors care about IRR and liquidity.
OMGpop (known as I'm In Like With You at the time) was a pre-fund investment.
Also, I expect that the limited partners of YC have given them unusually flexible and favorable terms.
Re: Looks Like Zynga Just Bought OMGPOP For $200 Million
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
So many great companies and so many early exits. Great for the VC's and angels - bad for the founders and early employees. And the users. Imagine if Heroku, reddit and others had stayed independent. Facebook got this part right. Reject buyout offers and use them to raise capital at ever increasing obscene valuations - and build your product exactly as you want.
All this says to me is that YC does not directly fund Googles and Facebooks. This is still very good for the founders. They can take their exit money and self-fund whatever they want.
Google and Facebook are two companies out of many thousands (if not millions) of startups. The odds of anybody that big coming out of anywhere are microscopic. That being said, Dropbox and AirBNB are massive and very young companies. Between those two and the 150+ startups funded in the past 18 months, saying there will be no world-changing startups out of YC is premature.
Re: Looks Like Zynga Just Bought OMGPOP For $200 Million
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
No, it isn't. But up until recently OMGPOP was strangely hesitant to make mobile games (as relayed to me by a friend who used to work there). Look at their entries in the app store- they have three games. They went in a new direction and it paid off. I would have been interested to see them try to go further with it.
they can use part of the $210M to start another company.
Re: Looks Like Zynga Just Bought OMGPOP For $200 Million
#116Kind 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.
Seriously ? Been losing money for 5 years. Got one hit that makes money (not $200M money) and they sell. Excellent choice by OMGPOP
yeah. and they can always use part of that money to start another company.
Re: Looks Like Zynga Just Bought OMGPOP For $200 Million
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is a lot of money in aggregate. But when you break it down, it looks like a pretty good deal. Revenue multiple: Based on the reported figure of $250,000/day = $91.25M/year. At a purchase of $210M, this represents a multiple of 2.2x, far below the price/sales multiple of Zynga and Glu Mobile, two publicly traded companies on the US exchange. Sure, OMGPOP probably won't be hitting $250,000/day for the entire year bu…
how Zynga is going to make money (advertising on DAUs) off the users that ALREADY PAID for the no-ads Draw Something app? $250k/day with $0.99 per user == ~252,000 installs a day. That's almost 92MM installs per year. How many active users does App store have?
You're forgetting the in-app purchases. OMGPOP only makes a portion, albeit a minority, of their revenue from the initial sale.
Re: Looks Like Zynga Just Bought OMGPOP For $200 Million
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
The network effects of Draw Something's user base add immense value. Think FB vs. G+. If Zynga had made their own Pictionary game, it would have been a graveyard.
I'm not disputing that it is a wildly successful game. I am stating that a $200mm valuation of a single game is insane. I know the argument will be made that they bought the whole company, but this acquisition would not have happened if not for Draw Something. Given the number of developers working on producing the next big hit in games, there will be a Words With Friends or Draw Something released on an ongoing basi…
The value of the game to Zynga is higher than the value of the game on the open market, since Zynga can cross-promote their other games and also suck up a whole ton of personal information from the Draw Something userbase.
Re: Looks Like Zynga Just Bought OMGPOP For $200 Million
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
lol, because Zynga stole nearly all of their game ideas from other poeple. Graphics and all. http://www.businessinsider.com/how-zynga-is-just-like-micros... Don't forget Tiny Tower http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2012/01/25/everything... If Mark Pincus was more open about it and said "We're better marketers, business builders, and job creators than the original game creators. Yeah we copy their games, we might…
I guess I heard about that Tiny Tower thing... my takeaway is that nearly everybody borrows ideas from one another. Ideas are cheap, it's the implementation that really matters. Zynga has the means to move on things faster than a lot of competitors. >>Here's a quote from Mark Pincus, "I am proud of the ethical and fair way that we've built this company.". That's what makes Zynga despicable. That Mark Pincus claims hi…
This isn't "borrowing". This is IP theft. And these aren't "ideas" these are full blown products.
"Ideas are cheap, it's the implementation that really matters."
The games that Zynga copies were not "ideas" they were IP. And Zynga wasn't inspired by them. Zynga flat out, straight up, cloned them.
When you work your ass off, sacrifice time with your family, your savings, and invest it into building a profitable flash game online, iterating week after week until you get the formula just right. Only to have a bully come by and clone it. That my friend, is NOT borrowing. That's NOT implementing an idea differently. That is theft. Those are unfair business practices.
People like me are angry at Pincus because his method, if it becomes popular, could completely fuck up the startup ecosystem.
What if ALL of silicon valley starting acting like Pincus? Instead of acquiring sites and IP fairly, they simply cloned them. What if Google simply cloned YouTube div for div, color for color, feature for feature? What if Amazon cloned the technology used in Kiva's robotic logistics system instead of acquiring the company? What if Microsoft cloned skype and its algorithms instead of acquiring it? This isn't Github where you can fork someone else's work. These are companies that people put their lives and savings accounts into.
Here's how it works:
1: Crazy young entrepreneurs risk everything to find a new profitable business or build a new product. Because they're small they can easily pivot and reiterate day after day and evolve their product/solution/business faster than a big company.
2: They find something that works, VCs jump on board to grow the business/product/service and the crazy young entrepreneurs who worked their asses off expand their business/service/product.
3: Big players like Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon can use their muscle and dollars to acquire the startup and assimilate it into itself and offer this unique new service/business/product to their established customers. Thus benefiting the entrepreneurs who try new things, the investors who help grow new things, the big players with lots of established customers, and the end users. So many people benefit from this ecosystem.
What Zynga does is dangerous. It basically gives the little guy the finger, steals their hard earned IP and doesn't give anything back. This is what makes it despicable. Most entrepreneurs keep their voice down about it because they don't want to look like angry disgruntled losers who are envious of a successful entrepreneur. But if you don't call it out and say anything about it and on top of that give Pincus a CEO of the year award... That hurts all of us.
On top of all this, Zynga sees nothing wrong with what it does. Again, if they were open about the whole thing they'd be seen in a slightly better light. Still unethical copycats that hurt an ecosystem but at least honest about it. If they did the right thing and properly acquired the games they clone, we'd all be cheering Pincus on.
Re: Looks Like Zynga Just Bought OMGPOP For $200 Million
#120Kind 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.
Try Doodle or Die – it’s independently run by four random guys (disclaimer: i’m one of them). It’s more like Telephone than Pictionary. Much more freedom and the results are hilarious. http://doodleordie.com
Just tried Doodle or Die for the first time - it's a riot! You guys are doing fantastic work.
I dug up my wacom for the first time in years. Do you have any plans to support mobile safari? Would be fantastic on an ipad (or any tablet for that matter.)