
OMGPOP Team Tried To Buy Back Its Site, But Zynga Killed It Instead - duck
http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/05/omgameoverpop/
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DarkStar851
Copyright issues aside, am I the only one seriously thinking about writing an
emulator for the server-side component of a few of their games? I mean I'm sad
to see them go dark like I'm sure a lot of you are, and it sucks that such a
talented team's work is essentially going to waste, but I'm REALLY going to
miss OMGPOP.com's rendition of Pool! It was and is my favorite Pool game with
Miniclip's coming in as a close second.

I don't want Zynga to sue my ass, but it's almost worth it. Would anyone else
be interested in collaborating? Obviously I can't emulate all the games
myself.

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DarkStar851
Should mention I mostly write PHP, but my Scala should be up to scratch for
this too. Or C#, perhaps even Java ( _shudder_ ). I've got some free time so
if someone wanted to create the base in Ruby I'd be happy to assist.

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JoshGlazebrook
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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jlgreco
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".

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

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jlgreco
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.

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benzoate
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

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est
I never understand the logic behind acquire-and-shutdown process. Like
Google's last decade of shopping and killing spree, not long ago Yahoo bought
Astrid and shutdown million users. Are there any significant business
reasoning I am missing?

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samweinberg
When a company acquires another and then shuts it down, the reasoning usually
has something to do with intellectual properties or acqui-hiring the
employees.

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redthrowaway
Except in this case, they laid everyone off. Also, Zynga doesn't seem all that
interested in acquiring IP. I imagine this was just a fuck up on their part.

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rmc
They're keeping Draw Something

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meowface
If they are, that really seems like a nasty move. Buy a company, then shut
down all their products and services, fire all of them, then keep all of their
IP and ensure they can't use it again? I suppose it's not exactly theft, since
they got paid something up front, but it's still unfortunate.

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dlgeek
I've heard they're losing their best talent left, right, and center. Between
that and stuff like this, I wonder how much longer Zynga can keep going at
this rate?

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joeblau
Zynga should have sold it back for 300M-400M.

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eupharis
Or at least _something_. If I were a shareholder, I'd be irate. Maybe Zynga
has some grand master plan for Draw Something and whatnot. But as of now, this
looks like executives taking a massive, unnecessary loss in order to cover
their own incompetence.

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kevingadd
"These team members wanted whatever Zynga was willing to sell, even if that
didn’t include the more valuable Draw Something assets or user data. Even more
employees offered to work on OMGPOP.com for free. However, Zynga said this
would all take too much legal work and wouldn’t agree to sell anything."

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anigbrowl
This is a huge red flag. To me that says there's something that would emerge
during the due diligence process that Zynga does not want people to know
about. If I was a gambler I'd short them hard in response to this, my hunch is
that the firm is on its way to de-listing and collapse.

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kevingadd
Do you think that it would be related to the reasons for shutting down OMGPOP
operations? That is, they found some nasty skeletons in the closet, and the
best way to hide them is to wind down everything OMGPOP-related so that they
don't have to file reports about it and it doesn't ever get audited?

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anigbrowl
I couldn't say, and my comment above is honestly baseless speculation, just a
very strong hunch. I haven't read any of their public filings on that
acquisition so weight that appropriately.

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SimHacker
I wanted to launch a Shartcasting site, but OMGPOOP.com was taken.

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workbench
Serves them right really, what on earth did they think was going to happen

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Bjoern
Does being bought by Zynga automatically mean that they will close it down for
good? I don't think so.

