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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

#181

Post by yesplorer »

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 don't know exactly how many games Zynga has but I just did a quick check at zynga.com and I counted 33 games. hence on average 90 personnel per game? I think that is ludicrous especially considering the fact that the developers of Tiny Tower (which accused Zynga of a rip-off a couple of months back)build their game with 7 developers

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

#182

Post by shardling »

sdoowpilihp wrote: post #57
samstave wrote: post #27

I deleted DrawSomething from all my devices and we stopped playing it the day OMGPOP was purchased by Zynga... I vote with my appstore.

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)

OTOH, I genuinely stopped playing because of Zynga. Not out of some reflexive hatred, but because they started using push notifications to advertise upgrades/other games.

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

#184

Post by jacoblyles »

pavs wrote: post #12

I want to know what kind of thought process goes on company/individual's mind when they decide to do an acquisition like this, for $200M, which doesn't make enough money to justify it. You would think when you are throwing around that kind of money, they would do some rudimentary research? How much money was omgpop making at the time of the acquisition?

What kind of "rudimentary research" would you do to discover that the game wouldn't have the staying power of Words with Friends?

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

#185

Post by jimmaswell »

I guess I'll have to get to work on the Draw My Thing-type browser game I'd been working on a while ago now if OMGPop's going. Me and some friends liked that game a lot.

My implementation used javascript, php, and canvas, but I'm considering learning ASP.NET by making this with it. Any thoughts?

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

#186

Post by larsberg »

jacoblyles wrote: post #184
pavs wrote: post #12

I want to know what kind of thought process goes on company/individual's mind when they decide to do an acquisition like this, for $200M, which doesn't make enough money to justify it. You would think when you are throwing around that kind of money, they would do some rudimentary research? How much money was omgpop making at the time of the acquisition?

What kind of "rudimentary research" would you do to discover that the game wouldn't have the staying power of Words with Friends?

Talking to users? I don't know if you saw anyone play Draw Something, but unlike every other social game I've watched my wife play, she seemed to talk about it as a horrible chore after the first two days.

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

#187

Post by jfb »

potatolicious wrote: post #164
winter_blue wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm... that sounds sky-high. Couple of my friends are working for startups in the NYC area, and making $60k (they're all recent graduates). They're really smart and really good at what they do. A lot of my acquaintances are working at those various Wall Street firms earning about $85k. Finally, I have a friend who switched to Google NYC after about 9 months at a Wall Street firm (at $85k). Google started him off at $…

Tell your friends to dust off their resumes ;) Seriously though, $60K in NYC is extremely below market for almost any type of programming work. The only scenario I can imagine that happening is if you're writing VB6 Excel macros. Hell, even that in NYC is probably more than $60K. $85K is also very below market. In fact, unless you're working in a niche that's extremely under-demanded, anything below six-figures I'd c…

Curious -- I'm a video guy. What's your sense on the market in NYC for streaming digital video jocks?

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

#188

Post by anonyfuss »

socialist_coder wrote: post #135
untog wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shrug, it's not like he wouldn't get paid for it. I have no idea just how miserable it would have been working at Zynga, but working for a year in order to get three month's of severance doesn't sound too awful to me.

I worked at Zynga for a year + some months. It's actually a good place to work. You learn a ton about social / viral games and monetization, make really good contacts, get paid at or above market salary, eat really good food, and get all the other startup perks. And, you're still doing game development so it's not like your skills don't transfer. I don't regret working there at all. I just wish the stock hadn't of ta…

> You learn a ton about social/ ...

That ...

> viral games

.. sounds ...

> and monetization

.. horrible.

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

#190

Post by alexmorse »

wpietri wrote: post #167
alexmorse wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ex-zyngite here. To your questions above, my opinions. I'm no expert, just have some experience there. 1) The massive staff is due to massive success initially, then massive management mistakes continually, from the top down the chain. That's not to say there aren't great people fighting the good fight; There are many intelligent and capable people, but there's also a great deal misalignment of interests throughout t…

Hey, you can answer something I've been wondering about. What portion of people at Zynga genuinely like the games they're making, and what fraction think they're terrible? I ask because one writer in Hollywood mentioned that she was surprised to discover that the people in charge actually like the dreck they shovel out. Her theory was that having real taste in Hollywood was a handicap to career advancement. I was won…

I worked closely with 3 studios, pretty closely with maybe 5 total. A studio tends to be about 50 people, maybe as big as a hundred.

In those, there were many people that liked their job. By job I mean, the challenges, the scale, and environment. I only met a handful that were jazzed up about the game they were working on... and that was usually the most heartbreaking, because they just never had an opportunity to change things for the better as far as game design, or the art. There are two specific people I know as exceptions, that are tenacious as hell, and made concessions only when absolutely necessary. Total respect for them, but they're still pretty beaten down and discouraged.

Intermittently, a lot of people got excited about games. Overall a lot of people derided the games they were making, a lot of the time.

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