Posts tagged zynga

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Remember Draw Something? It was this wonderful, flash-in-the-pan game by the utterly charming developer OMGPOP, and had the misfortune of being such a success that it caught the evil overlord attentions of Zynga, who promptly bought the company, killed a game an ex-OMGPOP had privately made for his wife, and then ran the company into the ground, laying off the vast majority of the team.

OMGPOP’s practically dead now, and the only purpose the shell of the company serves is as a cautionary tale not to let Zynga touch anything good or wholesome, ever. There’s still more OMGPOP assets Zynga can kill, though: next up on the chopping block, Zynga plans to behad OMGPOP’s popular gaming portal website.

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Zynga has reportedly closed down Draw Something studio OMGPOP and laid off all of its staff just 14 months after it was acquired in a $180 million deal. OMGPOP released its Draw Something sequel back in April, but it appears it wasn’t the success the company hoped it would be.

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OMGPOP CEO Dan Porter has confirmed that a sequel to the smash hit drawing game Draw Something is “coming soon.” The first screenshot of the new title was posted to Twitter by none other than TV host Ryan Seacrest shortly before Porter made the news official.

“I somehow convinced them to give me #DrawSomething2 first,” Seacrest wrote.

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Zynga has announced that it will kill off 11 of its social games as part of a new cost-reduction plan that aims to improve its profitability. Many of the titles have already been closed and removed from app stores, while others will be shuttered in the coming weeks and months. PetVille, FishVille, and Mafia Wars 2 are three of the titles on the hit list.

When you combine all the titles in Apple’s App Store with those in Google Play, you have a catalog of more than 1.4 million apps from hundreds of thousands of developers. But incredibly, more than 50% of the revenue made by these stores in the United States goes to just 25 app developers.

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