
Zynga, Where the Numbers Never Lie - curtis
http://www.kotaku.com.au/2015/04/welcome-to-zynga-where-the-numbers-never-lie/
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spiritplumber
We helped build the LED tunnel at Zynga's office entrance (that was
objectively fun) and the Zynga guy basically treated us like day laborers, at
one point even going "Look, I also am an engineer, except I make fifty times
more than you" when he asked something that violated the conservation of
energy.

Eventually I had to ask Keith to do all the talking with the guy because I was
this close to stuffing him in a server rack.

I'll be happy when they go away.

~~~
strathmeyer
I'm always curious at what point in dealing with Zygna and their allies we are
supposed to pretend that they don't steal from other programmers or try to
ruin the business. When speaking with them or other programmers about them I
am always super polite but when there are facts that it are too taboo to bring
up, we can form conclusions about the entire company.

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spiritplumber
It didn't come up for us, we were doing a hardware project. What did come up
was the fact that this one guy in particular somehow knew how to do our job
(whether that be the metalwork, the electronics, the firmware...) better than
us, about half a dozen times. I guess the sociopath attitude thrives in that
environment.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
People with egos and poor social skills abound in many tech companies,
unfortunately. I think the sociopath label is applied too liberally, meaning
you were probably dealing with a plain old asshole (real sociopaths have real
social skills and make you like them so they can better manipulate you).

~~~
spiritplumber
Sociopaths try to manipulate you if they think they can get something out of
it. If they think you're just beneath them, they revel in being asshats at you
and knowing that there is nothing you can do about it. The measure of a man is
making sure that you do something about it anyway.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Perhaps you haven't met a real sociopath before? There are alot of them, they
are always nice to you and use your positive feeling for them against you.
They typically go into management.

I have never seen a sociopath go the asshole route: they aren't going to do
something so socially stupid, it doesn't serve their goals at all. I see
people on HN a lot confusing low social IQ (what assholes have) for high
social IQ (sociopaths); it is just very wrong.

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golergka
Just a bunch of comments here, and seems like people didn't seem to read the
article at all and just jumped to the traditional Zynga bashing.

Which, considering what's the article is about, is very ironic.

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ransom1538
I was there hacking in the beginning. With the Eris S, roger dickey, neil,
kenneth, etc. They entered into a market with free users and based their
predictions on this. FB cut them off by limiting the virality. That was game
over 2012. (Mobile ads cost money).

Zynga is in deep shit. I mean deep shit.

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Yhippa
I found some videos on their Facebook page about Empires & Allies. It looks
interesting. Almost like a 1:1 clone of C&C which is not surprising given
Skaggs involvement. I will give it a shot when it's generally available but I
predict it will have paywalls, timewalls, and encourage spammy messages to
friends to proceed.

Companies like Zynga I feel created a race to the bottom for mobile. There are
some cool mobile games out there but most of the stuff on the Google Play
Store are games specifically optimize to suck as much money out of your wallet
as possible.

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Fizzadar
Fascinating account on the rise and subsequent collapse of Zynga. Given what
was said, and as the author pointed out, why the hell is Pincus back and Don
out? Some very strange goings on over there...

edit: it's nice to see them outputting something a little more interesting
than Farmville :)

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gabeio
They really did become arrogant... they bought a whole other company just for
one game, draw my thing(mobile), and then destroyed the website(omgpop.com,
previously iminlikewithyou.com) which had multiple other long lived games that
still had hundreds of users.

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spacehome
Hundreds of users? Not merely dozens?

I can totally understand a company on Zynga's scale killing games that have
tens of thousands of DAUs.

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gabeio
Yes probably more than hundreds (but I have no idea), which is why they bought
the company but most of the users at that time were centered around Draw My
Thing. There were still two or three very active games on the main site
though. Admittedly there were multiple nearly dead games and also games that
you had to know to access...

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arfliw
It's called Draw Something and omgpop was a tiny site when they shut it down.
Something like Alexa 2 million. It had effectively no users.

Every tech company does that to surplus assets in an acquisition because
keeping them running would require more resources than they are worth and
they'd be a distraction.

Google killed several Slide games that were relatively big. Same reason.

