Zynga down ~40% in after hours trading
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I realize this isn't actually the end of them, but it's indicative of where they're going.
I think in the end, the narrative for zynga will be roughly this: they found a way to capitalize on markets that really weren't being served at all (last I heard, the average zynga customer was roughly a 43 year old woman -- not your average target market for games). And then they killed their own golden goose.
They offered an experience that was safe, accessible, and novel to people that had never gotten to experience games on those terms, and the market exploded.
The problem is, what they offered wasn't sustainable. Instead of parlaying their initial shallow success into advancing the art form, they tried to optimize it in a way that wasn't really ethical. Their games were designed to be exploitive in the same sense that gambling is exploitive (using the same cognitive mechanisms.) They expected that people would just keep coming back for the same reasons people become compulsive gamblers -- because they can't help it. But buying more trinkets in a game that makes you check up on it every four hours isn't the same experience as being a VIP at a casino and even for the most compulsive people I think the nature of a zynga game becomes pretty gross after a while.
So I guess I'd say they made bad games for ethically dubious reasons, and nobody in their right mind should miss them when they're inevitably gone.
And, while they didn't make any money on their own, there were some '90s games like that as well. In his book on casual games (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262517396/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...), Jesper Juul also notes the interesting existence of very hardcore Freecell and Minesweeper players, who tend to come from nontraditional gamer demographics and don't consider themselves "gamers", despite objectively playing many hours/day and becoming very skilled at their games of choice.
1) Automatic Facebook login checks. I'm fine with this since everyone I played with are on Facebook. The problem here is that sometimes the automatic login does not work leading me to constantly open, close, open, close, open the app just to get the the main screen.
2) The game is buggy as hell. Not only is the login bad, but the game constantly dies. Its not fun anymore. In the back of your mind you know that as soon as you click out of an ad, the application will close out causing you to reopen it to see ... more ads. Its ludicrous.
3) Speaking of ads, there's like 3 times the ads as before. Some ads don't even have a way to click out of it. You're just stuck looking at a 10-30 second ad to draw (if the app didn't close) for 10 seconds. It also seems as if every time you touch a screen, you get an advertisement. Its ridiculous.
It wasn't like this game was that fun to begin with. But turning a game into a chore just makes you not want to play it anymore. And I haven't.
The market writ large ignored the input from those in the know and is now acting surprised -- it befuddles the imagination.
Once again, Joe Public and his retirement get the short end of the stick. Manufacturing money is a dirty business. I wonder if we'll ever look at Silicon Valley VCs in the same light as we do Wall Street bankers?
Guidewire is up over 80% even after the recent pullback, because it has a real business model and steady, recurring income. It'll probably get beaten down more by the lock up expiration over the next month or so, but I'd bet dollars to donuts it doesn't drop anywhere close to its IPO pricing.
TechCrunch articles are cool, but facts are stubborn things. If you spend more than you make, eventually that shit will catch up with you.