The latest news to hit the stands has been about Zynga - a gaming publisher that recently let go over 500 employees and announcing the closure of both their NY and LA studios in order to save major bucks. This is HUGE news. Zynga is known for a number of popular casual gaming experiences most notably Farmville.
Hey look, that looks just like me and my farm!!
Zynga is an example of a company that basically had it all and had a competitive market share within the casual gaming experience (this category can be accredited to Nintendo) but lost it rather quickly due to some poor acquisition choices (such as OMGPOP! which, guess what, they also just announced to shutting down). Zynga didn't keep up with the times and produce enough content that interested the end users - people like me! Games like Farmville have a short life span - they take a little while to become popular, have a huge spike in popularity and then fizzle and die once we become bored with tending to our crops. Companies like King.com, I feel, do it the right way where they first beta test a game on their own website. If it receives acclaim and starts to gain traction, they roll it out to Facebook and eventually a mobile application. This is a pretty successful business strategy and why Candy Crush and Bubble Witch Saga are now such popular games and have had a longer life span (does anyone even remember Draw Something?...didn't think so.)
Zynga is a starting to look like a future college level case study for the tech industry; showcasing how easy it is to go from rags to riches and back to rags again if you don't make intelligent business decisions.
ReplyDeleteIn my opinion, they misinterpreted what made Farmville so successful. Something that resulted in a half-baked business model and poor customer retention.
Still, always sad to see gaming companies take a hit =\