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Comment by JoshGlazebrook | Hacker News Reader

I still think it was a mistake to buy OMGPOP. Draw Something was one of those games that you get addicted to, but it only lasts a week or two. Eventually it becomes saturated in that game market, and unfortunately for Zynga they bought it when it was in the middle of this process.

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The question I have is, if OMGPOP had been left to their own devices, is it likely that they would have been able to churn out more short-term hits?

It seems plausible to me that they would have been, which implies to me that companies that are like OMGPOP are worth more independent than if they are acquihired. The process of acquihiring such companies could very well be self-defeating.

If you try to buy "it", you don't actually get "it".

How can you reliably turn out hits? If you could, the one-hit wonder wouldn't exist. We'd only have hit machines.

The very existence of the term 'hit machine' implies that some people are able to do so reliably. This is certainly true in music.

You think? VC funds, record labels, games studios are all hits-run businesses. Of course some of them make profits, but none can guarantee hits.

Stock Aitken Waterman turned out over 100 top 40 hits in less than a decade. Now I'm sure they no doubt had their fair share of misses in that period, but with a track record like that I still think it's fair to call them a "hits-machine".

I think we need to define "reliably". Does it mean "enough to make a profit" (which would depend on the ratio of profits/losses on hits vs misses) or "guaranteed" i.e. every item is a success.

And anyway Stock Aitken and Waterman were actually a Hits Factory :-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hit_Factory:_Pete_Waterman%...

The pop singer faced numerous disagreements with the song's co-producer. Quincy Jones did not want "Billie Jean" to appear on Thriller; he felt that the song was too weak to be part of the collection. The producer disliked the demo and did not care for the song's bassline. Jones wanted to cut Jackson's 29 second introduction, which was the longest one ever created at the time. The entertainer, however, insisted that it be kept. "I said, 'Michael we've got to cut that intro'", Jones later recalled. "He said, 'But that's the jelly!' [...] 'That's what makes me want to dance'. And when Michael Jackson tells you, 'That's what makes me want to dance', well, the rest of us just have to shut up."

I don't think there is a procedure that you can follow, but I think that if you assemble the right team and strike gold once, you can keep the gravy train rolling.

I'm using music as my model here. Some bands never make it (those guys who played your highschool house party in exchange for beer), some bands get lucky once but just didn't have the right team to keep it rolling (one hit wonders), and other bands get lucky once and do have the team to keep that sort of momentum going (I'd say The Beatles fits in here. Nobody really cares about their first hits, but they were a band for a while before 'getting discovered'.)

(In extraordinarily rare cases you have bands that arguably didn't strike gold through luck alone, but they are probably rare enough to right off.)

So OMGPOP got lucky and hit gold once. Maybe they had the right team to keep that rolling, maybe they didn't. Acquihiring surely puts a breaks on the possibility of having the right team to keep it rolling though.

I don't think "being acquired" (getting signed) kills a band quite like it kills a dev team though.

...maybe the trick is to acquihire dev-teams like labels sign bands.

I was working with the OMGPop office whilst they were releasing Draw Something.. Half the people who actually worked on Draw Something announced they were leaving shortly before the Zynga takeover was announced, so I suspect they were missing some key people

With talent. Although there's never a guarantee.

For a studio like OMGPOP though it's important to note the downsides of cashing out big on the strength of one huge hit. It was great for the founders because they got their payday, but from a business perspective everyone else got ripped off. Had they not been acquired OMGPOP would not have been beholden to try to win back their purchase price in game sales, they would have only had to maintain healthy profitability. Which I think was well within their means considering the low cost of development of their games.

nerdook was able to churn out very popular, very similar Flash games for ages.

He did this primarily by a form of marketing, possibly unintentional, in which he was constantly accessible to and friendly with his fans.

E: Removed a dumb statement.

I'm not sure why you think that. I had known of OMGPOP for a few years prior to Draw Something because some friends and I played their tetris game. To have one hit like Draw Something in those couple of years doesn't suggest to me they would've had much further success.

But once you have Draw Something and hundreds of millions of users, it's easier to launch the next hit.

Having that leverage is a big advantage in the iOS marketplace where discovery is a major challenge for newcomers.

almost all game companies are contrary to this

Are you talking about iOS game companies or other game companies? I'm talking about iOS game companies.

Also, I didn't say it was a guarantee, but it is far far easier. Also, remember the scale of Draw Something. Over 100 million downloads in the first year.

What are examples of iOS gaming companies with multiple hits?

The question I have is, if OMGPOP had been left to their own devices, is it likely that they would have been able to churn out more short-term hits?

We'll never know, since Zynga effectively kneecapped them.

Probably, or raised a large sum of money to then have the runway, because they in part proved they understood something and created value or something people would use.

"The pop game design firm that gets acquihired is not the pop game design firm."

I don't think you'll find many people here who disagree with you there. Since these apps by default are stand alone, so they can't leverage large user bases as well as web apps. And people don't really feel loyalty to companies and their games, they just like to play what's fun.

> I still think it was a mistake to buy OMGPOP.

tell that to the people that got in on that secondary offering ;)

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-23/zynga-ceo-pincus-to...

True, but maybe they bought it for the userbase, as much as for the games? I'm just speculating but if you have someone spending money on a game or gaming online, is it easier to cross-sell them?

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