61–70 of 160 posts
There are virtually no barriers to entry in the market, and there is no point at which there will be no emerging competitors. This is not a stock I would want to be a part of.
"it has recently been netting around $250,000 a day from the game — that’s after Apple takes its 30 percent cut." $7.5 million a month at the very beginning of their hockey stick growth, and they are willing to sell for $200 million? Deal of the century for Zynga... They should have leveraged this into a massive funding round and started making acquisitions, growing etc. Nobody is ever going to compete with Zynga if…
> "Deal of the century for Zynga and a horrible, cowardly business decision for them to sell." You realize that OMGPOP is founded and staffed by real human beings, who are probably reading these threads today, right? I can respect the opinion that selling to Zynga was the wrong call - but your tone and wording is entirely inappropriate. If the founder and employees of the company were sitting across the table from yo…
fwiw I was talking about the investors/CEO etc, the people who made the decision on the sale. Not the employees.
It's interesting how 2 years later we're vilifying Zynga (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1041604)
It's interesting how iminlikewithyou after 5 years finally sold out.
It's interesting how gaming of all forms became the big hits big business Hollywood vainly wish it could still be.
Think about what would happen in another 5. Then do it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not commenting on this particular situation, but to answer your question in general: If a company has an IPO, there are no "employee retention payments", so it's better than that :) Employee retention payments are actually a way to give employees a somewhat better deal than investors, though typically they will be subject to vesting.
> If a company has an IPO, there are no "employee retention payments", so it's better than that :) The reverse split of common before preferred share conversions for IPO are often a big screw to the employees. Many are also unaware of it, as they don't dig through the S-1. (Atheros was the largest one I saw in this camp.)
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A $200MM talent acquisition? This meme needs some suppression.
Pretty disappointed that I was downvoted, given that it was a genuine question. No need to be cryptic or condescending. I'm asking because this is shop that makes a lot of iOS apps with a hope that one hits. They don't have a singular product that they sell. So what is Zynga buying?
Draw Something is everywhere and it's an awesome game. Good move for OMGPOP to cash out. It's a lot of money to throw at a studio that has basically only produced one hit game. Or maybe I am too old to recognize any of their other games ;)
The web platform has made a number of moves to monetise in recent years, putting more and more features behind payment-based tokens. It'd be interesting to know what proportion of their income comes from the web gaming platform.
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.
Really sad actually. The only reason why Zynga bought them is because Draw Something is so high profile, that there was no way Zynga could steal it. As I said over on Quora, this really sucks as Zynga is a despicable company. Surely, the folks at OMGPOP had been worried that Zynga would try to steal this game, as they have done every one else -- and I would be interested to know what they thought of Pincus' character…
That rivals the Heroku for the biggest YC exit so far! (Heroku was ~$212million) OMGPOP would slot in at #2. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AkkhSN3vaY4jdF9... This likely means YC gets about $3-5million out of the deal, funding even more startups in the future. :) (edit: Originally wrote Flightcaster for some reason; meant Heroku. Was thinking of Flightcaster earlier today and got confused.)
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty disappointed that I was downvoted, given that it was a genuine question. No need to be cryptic or condescending. I'm asking because this is shop that makes a lot of iOS apps with a hope that one hits. They don't have a singular product that they sell. So what is Zynga buying?
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.
(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).
That rivals the Heroku for the biggest YC exit so far! (Heroku was ~$212million) OMGPOP would slot in at #2. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AkkhSN3vaY4jdF9... This likely means YC gets about $3-5million out of the deal, funding even more startups in the future. :) (edit: Originally wrote Flightcaster for some reason; meant Heroku. Was thinking of Flightcaster earlier today and got confused.)
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.