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.
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 prior to the purchase.
At least they get to stay in NYC and be no place close to Pincus.
I hate Zynga games because of how buggy and slow they are.
But it's not like Zynga doesn't add value. The examples I've seen of Zynga copying the base of other games also have them making significant adaptations to better fit the market. Zynga really understands the market a lot better than many of the little guys, and they add lots of value to lots of users that way. I'm curious if there are counterexamples.
This is really disappointing for me.. (well.. from a games on my phone perspective)
I used to really like Words with Friends.
Then zynga did an app update where the icon was more about the zynga logo than the Words with Friends logo. (reverted after user backlash)
Then it was more and more 'buy our other games!' notifications.
Then the facebook integration slowed the app down so much it took 3-4x as long to actually play the game.
Yesterday I was saying to myself. Draw Something is so much better than Words with Friends, because it doesnt throw ANY of the zynga shit at me.
I actually found Draw Something to be pretty bad even before reading this. The whole game seems to be written in a too portable manner, ie., all UI elements self-written and noticeably different from UIKit, no GameCenter, the sizes are all weird...
I hope somebody does the reverse thing of Zynga and builds a LIGHTER, Apple-like version of it, I'd jump ship in an instant. Especially after going through the painful WWF fiasco. It might even be possible to get an App Store spotlight by being more "loyal" to Apple's way of doing things, and obviously not being portable.
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 not be original and creative but we're a lot more valuable for the market, and for the consumer." we'd see Zynga in a different light. It's the fact that he's completely delusional about it.
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. And Pincus a scary person. He's obviously an intelligent businessman but he's so caught up in his own bullshit that he actually believes it. That's what makes it frightening.
Well, let's be fair. OMGPOP is hardly a bastion of game design originality. For example, dinglepop is a 100% complete rip-off of Puzzle Bobble / Bust a Move, which Taito released in 1994. There have been countless clones since then, and there's nothing distinguishing dinglepop from any of them.
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.
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.
In China, the big players crush small startups by cloning them within a few days of them getting popular, and in some cases deploy dirty tactics against them (I'm thinking of an antivirus being interfered with on users' computers because it was removing part of a giant's software - was Tencent involved?). The point is that in China, everything gets cloned really quickly and the big players keep winning the market by pushing the new services out to their existing users, who don't seem to care that much about not letting one company dominate. It's a horrible model that I believe is entrenched by the big boys having influence with those in power.
How come this doesn't happen in the US, where copying does take place, but less directly and quickly? It's not like quickly copying a startup idea is illegal, and anyone can claim they've been working on something similar to a new idea for a while. Is it perhaps because there's a diversity of channels and forums by which new startups can market themselves, whereas in China everyone uses Baidu/QQ/Renren/Weibo and some of those sites possibly block out competitors' marketing?
I don't know, just thinking out loud and looking for more-informed opinions.
Some games are hard to clone within a few days even with tens of engineers and artists. How fast do you think a Chinese game company could clone Skyward Sword? Or even how fast do you think it would take Zynga for that matter? There are other games too, up and down the spectrum of AAA to garage-indie, that I don't think are so easy to copy in a short period of time--especially not short enough that you could dispel the first mover advantage if it was actually something worth copying. There are of course even more technologies outside the game industry that are hard to copy that startups have already gotten in to or even grown into. Amazon seems like a hard company to copy everything they do and still win.
What's personally depressed me about all these mobile games and their companies is they're all just circle-jerking and ripping off the same games that came out 10-20 years ago as well as digitalizing games that have been around for hundreds of years, and many of them I think "I could clone at least 90% of that in a weekend"... I don't think there's anything morally wrong with them, but it's not my cup of tea for what I want to play or how I would want to make money and I do sense a lack of "taste". I think OMGPOP got their payday, leave them alone. But I also think if you're in the business of what can be easily duplicated in terms of effort, as opposed to flat out copying files, prepare for the big companies to win.
In light of pg's recent article amounting to "information wants to be free" and there's nothing we can do about it...
How, exactly, is what Zynga is doing different from pirating films, music, or software? In both cases, it seems to me that the original creator hasn't lost anything. They still have their game. They still get to say "they" made it. Etc.
Are we really only against pirating when it helps big companies and not when it hurts them?
Wasn't me, I actually think it's a good question, really made me think. In this instance I don't believe an "all or nothing" attitude about all IP is healthy. The same way an all or nothing attitude about taxes, war, death penalty, and freedom of speech is healthy. Too much protection and we get patent trolling, not enough protection and we get IP theft leading to less innovation and unfair treatment of the inventors. Naturally, our instinct is to share something with friends when we discover it. Which is why music and movies are pirated so much. Stealing IP, that's also a human instinct passed down from our lovely evolutionary primate relatives. To an extent it's beneficial (creative commons, github forking, open source projects) and too much stealing/borrowing is destructive to its inventors while really beneficial to the stealing party (Like the way China's been "borrowing" high speed rail and maglev technology from Siemens, Transrapid, and other companies and re-patenting everything with slight changes so they can avoid licensing costs and can resell the technology as "Chinese Innovation"). At that level it's really unacceptable, pirating music and movies here and there, that's entertainment, it's not right but it's not seriously destructive to society.
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.
Google didnt have a long history of already outright stealing others' work.
What you reference are not clones. They are services in the same space with utterly different UI/UX/features and an /attempt/ at differing value props.
ZYNGA MAKES EXACT CLONES - there is a difference. If you are not familiar with the topic, don't comment as though you're having some new profound insight.
I don't understand what people are missing about Zynga. I feel like I am talking to people who have about zero historical context of shit that has been happening in Silicon Valley.
Did you just discover the internet today? The list is endless. They hired people when they were small at lower wages with stock options. Then when they made it big they took those options away! The scumbag CEO claimed he was right because if he didn't do this a cook might become rich, as if a cook has no right to get FU money for taking a risk. Every game they have is a rip off of other people's. The CEO has said in interviews that he's done ever evil thing there is to do to gain success.
If you don't think Zynga is a despicable company than I can't imagine you believe this is such a thing.
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.
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.
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.)
Fun times. I actually played "telepictionary" aka "telestrations" for the first time probably back in 2007. It's a blast. Good to see someone made it digital.
the vast majority of all computer and board games that exist are not made by Zynga, including 99%+ of the masterpieces. so I'm not too worried about one particular computer game company being bought by Zynga. The most key people, the game designers (to the extent they have them) will be free to create new games again, whether at Zynga or elsewhere after leaving.
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.
Founders often don't have a choice as to whether to accept buyout offers. In the case of OMGPOP, which had received a ton of VC funding and struggled for years until finally finding some success, I can definitely see why VCs would want to force a sale. (In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if VCs generally think that "make games for iOS" is not a business model that is capable of the kind of returns they need anymore, and they want to avoid taking further risk on that model—hence they forced the sale.)
Facebook rejecting buyout offers from larger companies not currently in the (at the time rather small) social space is not the same as OMGPOP rejecting a lucrative offer from a major player in a saturated market.
There are always two sides for each story. You hear about a lot of successful companies that rejected a buyout, only to die in obscurity. I guess it all depends on the shareholders and what they want to do. Sometimes it's good to take home a good chunk of profit and look elsewhere.
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.
The biggest companies in the YC portfolio are independent and getting bigger all the time. It still remains to be seen whether a Facebook or Google will come out of YC.
> This likely means YC gets about $3-5million out of the deal, funding even more startups in the future. :)
I'm fairly sure that YC doesn't recycle the money off from wins, but instead returns it to their investors. YC is a for-profit fund that uses other people's money to give about $20k cash and $20k of training in exchange for 6% of their company.
When I wrote that I didn't mean it in a strict accounting sense, but in a holistic sense. ie, I don't see PG and Jessica buying a yacht with their YC earnings, but I can see them plowing the earnings back into the program. :)
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 ;)
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 but even at a 50% discount, you're in the same range as Glu.
DAU cost: Assume CPI of $1.50, install/DAU conversion rate of 10%. This equates to a DAU cost of ~$15. It's safe to say that OMGPOP has >10M DAU, which means ZNGA bought the company at <$20/DAU. Additionally, the above CPI and install/DAU conversion rate are quite low. I've been hearing that OMGPOP is seeing 1-day retention rates of 50-75% which is amazingly high. This means that with continued growth and similar retention rates, ZNGA got a pretty good deal in terms of DAU acquisition cost.
The main advantage for Zynga is that they can leverage OMGPOP's DAU and cross-promote their existing titles. And with their experience in monetizing titles, it's safe to assume that ARPU will increase.
I can't comment on their mobile offerings, but OMGPOP has been running a fairly unique web-based online gaming platform for years. They certainly had a fairly large userbase when I was using the site a couple of years ago, but I guess the facebook and mobile apps were the ones that really brought users.
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.
Well this sucks. I just got into Draw Something yesterday and have been a fan of OMGPOP since Iminlikewithyou (hipster), but a company like Zynga does not deserve this game, or my attention to it. Zynga is well known for being theives and gathering as much possible data as they can about their users to sell off to ad companies and such. Looks like I'll be uninstalling this Draw Something once the switch takes place.
Iminlikewithyou was way ahead of its time and I'll always remember it as the site that made me realize rich real-time user interaction was possible on the Web.
Congrats to Charles and team! I've loved their games for ages, and hopefully their focus on quality will spread at Zynga.
I have some friends at another game company that was bought, and after a recent chat recently, I'm FAR more excited by what they are building now than what they had before. So to all those that are worried about this, I think the studio nature of gaming companies means that their acquisitions don't necessarily kill innovation.
Zynga points. You can use them across Zynga games to get e.g. exclusive pumpkins in Frontierville. There's a cap which resets every day, so you know when you can stop playing.
What.
[edit to add: Not currently playing any Zynga games. League of Legends pushes my buttons much better.]
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!
Wow, good for them. I've been with them since they were "I'm In Like With You," a fun but pointless "social flirting" site (at least, that's my memory of what it was) before they turned to social gaming. I didn't think they were going to make it for a while.
Credit to VCs. I've been guilty in past of noting how raising VC money may take away reasonable exits possible with no funding or just angel. In this case, it is very clear without VC money this company would have been dead pooled many many years ago.
I'm dying to know the cash/stock split on this one. It will send signals about what a company like OMGPOP thinks of the social gaming space going forward.
Considering they just spent 6 years working in the sector, what they think of Zynga's future is telling.
> I'm dying to know the cash/stock split on this one. It will send signals about what a company like OMGPOP thinks of the social gaming space going forward.
It also signals whether znga thinks its stock is overvalued or undervalued.
> Now Zynga has scheduled a call for a “news announcement” for 3pm eastern. I’m going to go out on a short limb and assume it’s to formally acknowledge that they have bought the company.
I'm glad the news seems to have been confirmed (?), but I must say that the headline is rather disingenuous, given that there was no actual confirmation. Even the lede makes it seem that there's no doubt; just confirmation of a previous rumor. I don't ask for anything major - just a single word (or two).
(I originally posted this comment for the other submission a split second after it was deleted, but it still applies - glad HN at least chose the more responsible title).
OMGPOP was smart to do this deal. They really had no choice. It seems really difficult to come up with new games. If they didn't do the deal, Zynga would have cloned the app and introduced it to their huge network of "_____ with friends" players for free and OMGPOP would have lost market share and revenue.
It was bound to happen -- Now they have to pay a premium for having failed to launch a game in this genre. The model was proven by Newtoy with Words with Friends (which they acquired) and Zynga has since launched a series of others based on the same model (Hanging with Friends etc.). All they need to do is look at the biggest existing markets for board games, console games, etc. and apply it to the WWF model. Pictionary should have been a no-brainer!
I don't understand Zynga's strategy. Are they trying to establish themselves as the De Beers of mobile gaming? This seems like an unsustainable strategy. If they just buy out every gaming company as it begins to exhibit growth at insane valuations, they are going to run out of money.
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.
But $200mm for a company that built the electronic version of Pictionary that was released six weeks ago? That is insane!
The gaming industry is not one that can be controlled by a single company. I don't mean to sound harsh, but it is pretty clear to me that Zynga has too much money and very little vision. The numbers just don't make sense.
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.
Yes, I would pay $200mm for a game that nets $250k/day or $91.25mm/year. Assuming Zynga does nothing but maintain the revenue, it will make back it's investment in a little over 2 years. How many investments opportunities are out there that net you a ~40% yield!? Of course there is risk with an investment like this, but this is after all, their core business and they are probably very good at mitigating those risks.
Ha, right. And in related news, at its height, the Pet Rock was netting a million dollars a day. At that rate, why didn't somebody pay $700 million to acquire the company? They could have made their money back in two years.
Don't know anything about the Pet Rock, and you can poke fun all you want, but it doesn't change the fact that this title has significant revenue that is more likely to go up than down under Zynga in at least the medium term due to reasons such as:
- Cross promotion
- platform leverage
- historical performance of similar games
- and all of this operating in a market segment (mobile gaming) that is exploding not contracting.
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.
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.
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 basis. Why would Zynga get in the business of buying up these companies after the hits have been produced? Seems like a losing business model.
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.
Given that Draw Something fits within the same asynchronous turn-based model of the With Friends games (owned, of course, by Zynga), I'm curious to see where Zynga moves with branding. There's something to be said for unifying all future OMGPOP/With Friends games under the With Friends blanket for cross-promotional purposes, but the "X Something" brand does have some measure of brand appeal.
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.)
It doesn't make sense. The article mentions that OMGPOP makes 250 grand a day (that too after after all commissions). that equates to 91.25 million a year. IMHO, $200 million seems like a really small price.
Eventually they're going to run out of people to pay or play. Games don't tend to have a long lifespan, so it probably made sense for them to cash out while they're hot.
There's no way they can sustain this rate for 2+ years, which is what they'd need to do in order to make $200 million.
This is great news. OMGPOP would have headed in that direction anyway and now their talented, hardworking employees will see their careers boosted a bit earlier (maybe even a nice little payout?)
All the value OMGPOP might have ever had ( which besides Draw-something, they really didn't have * ) will evaporate into the creativity-destructing teeth of soul-grinder Zynga, leaving a big piece of the market available for Indie game-devs <3 that are awesome and actually give a d * mn.
* ) OMGPOP has actually been struggling for any kind of success in the casual/social game scene.
Maybe it will take less than half an hour for a move to be sent to my friend's phone. Hopefully it won't take too long for Zynga to move this game over to the zCloud and fix all the push notification bugs too.
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?
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:
I defer to your superior knowledge of the situation. (I'm not sure if the $50mm was low or high; as reported in the press, it included 2/3 in stock, which is probably worth 10x what it was back then at least, so congrats!)
The impressive thing is that the powerset guy actually used ("we can do a talent acq for $1-3mm per engineer" if we fail) in his recruiting pitch to hire people (and, presumably in his fundraising).
There's probably a good business model in being an "academy startup" which both shoots for the moon AND is a great place to work, builds skills, and can do a talent sale (or tech sale, maybe) if the product is unsuccessful, building that into the company from the start. That's probably what I'd do, especially if it were based outside the bay area and maybe strongly allied with a great school but lacking other good local employers (Waterloo, CMU, etc.)
I don't know. I'm not particularly educated or well-versed in these matters.
200MM for a talent acquisition seems high which is why I also wondered whether it was to capture future revenues from Draw Something. It was an innocent question.
I think it's got a winning formula, whether or not it was intentional or an accident I don't know, but it does so many things right. It caters to casual players (I can pick it up, guess, draw and put it down) or hardcore players (draw + guess all day and all night), it forces people to provide value back to the player they're against (after guessing you have to draw to play another game) and it has a good micro transaction system.
I've never played mobile games properly before but I find myself drawn into playing Draw Something along with all my friends, who like yours love it.
I actually don't really get the game that much. I've played, it's kind of fun, but half the time people can't figure out how to draw the subject and just write it out ... literally, this happens about 1/4 of the time. But kudos to them for their success. I do question the $200 million and I can only imagine, as another user said, Zynga would try to transition users to their other games in the long term.
What I like about is that everyone wins. Both & the person you are playing with get a reward (coins) for a successful guess. There's no cheating to worry about, no sore losers/winners, etc.
Also, having a little bit of coins may or may not entice you to get more (which means bugging more friends to play, or busting out the wallet).
I've never played this (first time I've heard of it), but it sounds like a game I used to play about 5 years ago online with people on IRC/Kongregate chat. I used to love it and spend hours playing it. Boy do I feel dumb now not remembering it when the mobile app craze started!
"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 people cash out to them the first chance they get every time.
A cowardly decision? Do you have any idea how stressful it is running a team of 30 employees and tens of millions of dollars in financing and not having a clear path to turn it into a successful company? OMGPOP made great video games for 5 years and none of them stuck. They deserve recognition for sticking to their vision and eventually finding one that is a hit, I can totally imagine why the team wants to sell and not have to worry about the next hit.
"They deserve recognition for sticking to their vision and eventually finding one that is a hit"
They absolutely do. But they are now the latest example of what not to do the second you finally gain traction. As I said in another comment, Facebook got this right. So many others do not, and it is really a pity in the social gaming space as there is a huge need for somebody to compete with Zynga.
How do you figure it's only the beginning of a hocky stick growth? Draw Something might just start lose steam in a couple months, the game market is very hit-oriented and a lot of these games don't stay on the top of the chart for very long.
The game industry graveyard is littered with 1 hit wonders that never managed to repeat their success after a single massive home run.
"Nobody is ever going to compete with Zynga if people cash out to them the first chance they get every time."
NimbleBit (TinyTower guys) rejected a Zynga acquisition offer. I hope that most game companies hate Zynga too much to allow themselves to be acquired by them.
I guessing that OMGPOP's investors pushed heavily toward this solution after years of little traction.
Some people have the belief "I'm going to work real hard for X years and try to make enough so that I don't have to work at all if I don't want to for the rest of my life." I don't know if this is what the CEO thinks, but if it is, I don't think it's cowardly.
I just can't agree with you. Not selling could have been a big gamble in about 8 months if the fad cools down. I think it's a gamble for Zynga as well but they have the pockets to make such a gamble. The OMGPOP team has been around for awhile and have not had great success so I get it.
Oh well.