Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Looks Like Zynga Just Bought OMGPOP For $200 Million

allthingsd.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 160 posts

Re: Looks Like Zynga Just Bought OMGPOP For $200 Million

#131

Post by dkrich »

reinhardt wrote: post #123
dkrich wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great. Would you pay $200mm for a game that was released a little over a month ago? It seems to me that money has no value in Silicon Valley. We've seen this story play out before, but I guess we'll need another bubble to clean out the rest of the suckers.

This may well be part of a bubble but what does the release date have to do with it?

Because there is very little evidence that the company can reproduce this success, or even that the current rate of revenue for that game will persist for any meaningful period of time. It is pretty clear that they (Zynga) made a snap judgment and decided to pick up the company, regardless of the cost.

This reminds me a lot of when Mark Cuban sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo. Yahoo execs overreacted to the potential of the technology that Broadcast had developed, and were drastically overpaying out of fear of missing out. Not a great position to make acquisitions from.

Re: Looks Like Zynga Just Bought OMGPOP For $200 Million

#132

Post by divadong »

dc-tech-fan wrote: post #96
untog wrote: post #10

Kind 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 spent an hour playing this awesome game! Really funny :) Great work!

Re: Looks Like Zynga Just Bought OMGPOP For $200 Million

#133

Post by dkrich »

robryan wrote: post #122
dkrich wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great. Would you pay $200mm for a game that was released a little over a month ago? It seems to me that money has no value in Silicon Valley. We've seen this story play out before, but I guess we'll need another bubble to clean out the rest of the suckers.

Would should they be spending their money on? I would look at is as user acquisition to, Zynga will quickly have their box in the app cross promoting their other apps.

Nah, I don't buy that. Most users play games on a one-off basis. That is, people realize a game is fun, get a few of their friends to play with them, and they're off.

I don't think Zynga gains any long-term competitive advantage from this. Most people don't play games because they know the company that produces them, they play them because they are a fun novelty. Games are necessarily one-off successes at the mobile/social level, because there is not really a storyline or steep learning curve, so I believe that a company that produces one successful game is no more likely to produce another than a company with no previous successes, assuming equivalent technical know-how.

Re: Looks Like Zynga Just Bought OMGPOP For $200 Million

#134

Post by qeorge »

dc-tech-fan wrote: post #96
untog wrote: post #10

Kind 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

I haven't laughed out loud from a website in a long time. This is really well done. Nice work.

Re: Looks Like Zynga Just Bought OMGPOP For $200 Million

#135

Post by ricree »

dc-tech-fan wrote: post #96
untog wrote: post #10

Kind 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

A lot of fun, but the sheer number of penis drawings and descriptions really limits who I can introduce this game to.

Re: Looks Like Zynga Just Bought OMGPOP For $200 Million

#136

Post by dc-tech-fan »

qeorge wrote: post #134
dc-tech-fan wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I haven't laughed out loud from a website in a long time. This is really well done. Nice work.

thank you!

Re: Looks Like Zynga Just Bought OMGPOP For $200 Million

#137

Post by dc-tech-fan »

divadong wrote: post #132
dc-tech-fan wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 spent an hour playing this awesome game! Really funny :) Great work!

thanks, glad you are enjoying Doodle or Die!

Re: Looks Like Zynga Just Bought OMGPOP For $200 Million

#139

Post by wilfra »

ChrisNorstrom wrote: post #119
joejohnson wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Google didn't buy YouTube because they didn't want to build YouTube, they bought it because everybody was on it and they couldn't gain traction with G Video. Same with Microsoft and Skype. Same with most acquisitions, including Draw Something.

Big companies clone each others IP all the time. What do you think Bing, Android and Google+ are? They are just clones of other peoples IP...

Zynga isn't buying this for the IP, nor is the IP itself what is truly valuable. They are buying it for the traction. When some small game company builds a tiny game that never takes off in any meaningful way and Zynga clones it and instantly creates something 10000x more popular than the original ever was, that is not the same thing. The smaller company had no userbase, community and traction to buy therefore they were not valuable to Zynga in the same way that Draw Something is.

Re: Looks Like Zynga Just Bought OMGPOP For $200 Million

#140

Post by rdl »

tptacek wrote: post #69
webwright wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What shop are you talking about? It's the #1 paid app, the #1 free app, and is king of the top grossing list, too.

Has there ever even been a "talent acquisition" in the (say) mid-8 digits? Since, say, 2006? Definition of a talent acquisition: you buy a company, and none of its offerings are available 18 months later under any brand. (The true definition would be "and all the members of the team are reassigned to a different project", but that's hard to know from the outside).

I don't think THIS was a talent acquisition so much as a super successful game, so successful Zynga couldn't rip it off and kill it, but there are definitely large talent acquisitions in recent history:

* Powerset. ~$100mm, July 2008, to Microsoft.

* Friendfeed, ~$50mm, August 2009, to Facebook.

* Slide, $228mmm August 2010, to Google.

(Takeaway: sell your company in the summer.)

Post reply on HN