

Ask HN: Why is Zygna failing? - redrory


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codeonfire
Their r&d expense quintupled last year. They went from 100 employees to 3k
employees within a short time. Maybe they had to do this, maybe it was hubris.
Zynga's administrative expense also sharply increased leading to strong
losses.

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waterlesscloud
I have no idea what the user stats are, only anecdotal evidence from friends.

But their aggressive monetization approach to their -ville games led everyone
I know to stop playing them. The games weren't fun, so burnout came fast.

That said, a fair number of my friends still play Words With Friends and/or
Scramble, though largely in their mobile app forms. I suspect these games do
not monetize very well.

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debacle
It's built on a platform of sand (Facebook), and it's trying to monetize in
the completely wrong fashion, and it's trying to run the company like an AAA
studio when all it does is sell freemium web games.

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samstave
Poor leadership, flimsy/parasitic business model, lack of long term engagement
path for users, chasing trends rather than creating them, PR failure.

Zynga is a company that is that high school most popular jock that hops in
front of all others and excels based on a small advantage in physique and
looks and personality and bullies the others out of the spotlight only to be
the 20-something failure who is realized as having stole al their charm from
observing others' talents and mimicing them - and ultimately winding up a
washed up meth head in modesto constantly claiming how great they would have
been.

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kimmiller
Trust HN to come up with a jock/nerd analogy to refer to a failing game start-
up.

~~~
samstave
Whats worse, my analogy or your snide remark about how cliche you feel that
analogy is?

