
Draw Something Loses 5 Million Users a Month After Zynga Purchase - jcc80
http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2012/05/04/draw-something-loses-5m-users-a-month-after-zynga-purchase/
======
Shenglong
Is this surprising? I've drawn an airport 7 times now.

Might seem like a trivial comment, but this is a classic case reflecting
inability to service player wants. If they kept their word list updated and
used a better algorithm to filter out repeat-words, they probably could have
mitigated their user churn rate.

Yes, perhaps a larger word list was part of their monetization strategy - but
Zynga should've realized that was a bad idea when it acquired the company.
When users pay for something, there needs to be an instant sense of reward,
_and_ a noticeable lasting sense of reward. A larger word list doesn't really
fall into either of those categories.

~~~
landr0id
This, and the number of games I had going on at one time were the main reasons
for me uninstalling it. The game was fun, up until I had 30 games going on at
once.

------
philfreo
Soon after the Zynga acquisition I opened the app and it asked me for a
new/additional Facebook permission to have access to post on my wall, with no
easy way to play my friends anymore if I said no. Could have something to do
with it.

~~~
ticks
I agree, but I am not so bothered with that these days... you can set
permissions within FB so that anything an app posts will only be seen by
yourself.

~~~
nimblegorilla
I am not so motivated to set my permissions. I'll just play different games
now.

------
oellegaard
Zynga completely abused the product. I started getting requests to give them
more rights on facebook, which I solved my signing in with my email - then
they started to send me push messages about weird things - I've heard they
even asked for read/write sms rights on Android devices. I can only see it one
way - Zynga might make cool games, but they are hardcore abusing regular
people - also non-techinal people unlike us, that does not realize the outcome
of granting these priveledges.

~~~
RobAtticus
The SMS permissions on Android are for an alternative payment system via SMS.
It's in the app description on Google Play.

Edit: Looks like they've since removed the permission and text related to it.
_shrug_

------
nostromo
"Halo 3 looses 5 Million Users 1 Month After Release" ... well of course it
did, because most games get old pretty quickly.

To understand if Zynga overpaid, you'd need to know if they bought OMGPOP for
a single hit title, or if they see them as a creative group with many hits to
come, like Blizzard or Valve.

~~~
denniedarko
What you're failing to consider here is that every user Halo 3 had paid
approx. $60 up front to become a user in the first place. The problem with
these free-mium games is that the average revenue per user is so much lower.

~~~
rapind
Exactly. There's no loyalty. Users won't hang around unless they've put
something in the pot. Zynga knows this though, since it's the whole premise
behind their initial success.

------
terenceponce
To be fair, people get bored of mobile apps, in general, pretty easily. I
remember playing Draw Something constantly for a few weeks then I eventually
stopped playing because it got old pretty fast. I don't think Zynga is the
reason why this is happening.

~~~
jcampbell1
Nothing in the title or article implies that the Zynga acquisition caused the
decline.

~~~
k-mcgrady
The title makes it sounds like the user decline is related to the Zynga
acquisition.

~~~
tatsuke95
What's important is that the relation is _being discussed_. Is it related? Is
it not?

We aren't asking these questions if Draw Something _added_ 5 million users
since the Zynga purchase. In fact, that would be expected.

------
lnanek
A friend who really loved the game tried to show it to me, but it kept having
server problems. I wonder if that was just an isolated case or if it was
frequent, in which case it could drive off users.

~~~
buro9
My girl and I stopped playing because of that. It went from playable to
unplayable literally within a week or two.

It would lose our moves (returning to "Your move" when you'd submitted
something hours before).

It would give strange errors "You're using this on more than once device"...
erm, no I'm not.

And once it forgot who I was and showed no active games once I logged in
again... effectively losing the games I was involved in from my account
perspective, but my girl could still see the game and when she nudged it re-
appeared on my phone.

And then there is just the non-responsiveness of the server. The start-up
splash used to show for less than a second, but now it takes 5-10 seconds if
it works at all.

For such a simple app and game it went from being a pleasant distraction to a
chore very quickly. As such, our use has plummeted in turn.

~~~
brendangregg
Anyone have technical insight into the issues? Non-responsiveness sounds like
performance scaling issues.

~~~
Jare
They posted about their infrastructure and mad dash to scale during the launch
weeks. [http://code.zynga.com/2012/04/scale-something-how-draw-
somet...](http://code.zynga.com/2012/04/scale-something-how-draw-something-
rode-its-rocket-ship-of-growth/)

It doesn't talk about current problems, but it may be possible to extrapolate.
Still, with user counts going down, scaling problems should be a thing of the
past.

------
xianshou
Every smartphone-equipped college student played Robot Unicorn Attack for a
month at one point too. It's a pretty well-made game, hilarious, fairly
demanding...and absolutely boring after you play it for the 50th time.

At this point, the speed of viral distribution represents both the blessing
and the curse of social companies. You can take your exponential growth this
month and extrapolate it over the next year, but that doesn't take into
account the dozen newcomers that will catch the attention of the fickle 15M
next month. When Metcalfe's law works on a scale of weeks instead of years,
network effects become more transient and less valuable. Hopefully this helps
teach the market that eyeballs alone should not justify an enormous purchase
price.

------
leftnode
I stopped playing it solely because I wholly disagree with Zynga the company
and how they operate.

~~~
joering2
i respect people like you alot. company's mission and how they behave before
their product.

+1.

~~~
nickpinkston
I find it funny this was being down-voted when I found it. Are we now against
the idea of voting with your dollars on what companies you buy from?

------
mcarrano
I noticed that about a week after Zynga purchased Draw Something, all of my
friends stopped playing. I no longer play either.

~~~
leviathan
I also stopped for a while, but then I created a throw-away email address and
used email signup instead of facebook. It's not convenient, but it lets you
play the game again.

------
sparknlaunch12
Seems odd that a company of that size and experience would stand back and
allow such a massive drop. 5 million of 15 million in a month. Ouch.

This drop is " active " users. This is not the end of the world but suggests
something bad happened.

------
keithpeter
"Whatever happens with the game now, they’ve made out like bandits."

Am I the only one who thought 'and jolly good luck to them'?

~~~
EvilTerran
That was my first thought, too; they've got a princely sum out of "the man",
by creating a popular product through (no doubt) a lot of hard work, and
without (it seems) wilfully screwing anyone over. Good for them!

------
MrFoof
In addition to the limited word list, poor repeat detection and Facebook
integration, another thing that probably rubbed some folks the wrong way are
the Sponsored Words.

Not everyone wants to draw Doritos, KFC or Coca-Cola.

------
3piphany890
zynga. think one million cold people in a dark room without hope for a light

~~~
joering2
can you imagine it to be a penny stock? they are right now where they were in
january.

------
eridius
I have to wonder how much of this drop can be attributed directly to Zynga
buying it (and their subsequent changes to the app). I know I stopped playing
the moment Zynga announced the buyout.

~~~
teamonkey
I doubt that Zynga is even on the radar for most of those 5m people.

------
Judson
After the acquisition I started getting spam push notifications and promptly
deleted the app. Not sure if this was a Zynga move, but it didn't make me want
to continue playing the game.

------
samstave
I deleted the game the day I found out Zynga was buying them. I refuse to have
anything to do with Zynga. I will never play their games, buy their stock or
support them in general.

------
bgilroy26
I can't help thinking that number would be of use if you were trying to
estimate the worldwide cardinality of techno-hipsters.

~~~
hedgie
aleph-null? what the fuck?

~~~
YuriNiyazov
for a finite set, its cardinality is just the number of elements in it.

------
nicolasd
I think the reason for this is the principle of the game.. with the time it's
boring..

------
Inphidel
I am tired of drawing the same things. I bet others are as well.

------
torstesu
Surely Zynga must have negotiated some earnout agreements or contigency
payments in order to mitigate the risk?

------
Havoc
So Zynga got screwed over. _fake tear_

------
TheBiv
This is simply because of college finals.

------
Kip9000
Also called 'regression to the mean'

------
michaelochurch
I think the Zynga acquisition had something to do with the peak.

Social network fatigue started a couple of years ago. That doesn't mean people
are ready to ditch social networks outright, but it means that the stupidest
abuses are going to leave a sour taste in peoples' mouths, and Zynga is so
well associated with these behaviors that, even if people like some of their
games, no one likes _them_.

Zynga's asset is that they understand addictive behavior and are probably the
world's leading experts in a specific niche, which is the online delivery of
addictive (not always high-quality) games through social media, and the
monetization thereof. This knowledge is going to be valuable no matter what
happens in social media over the next 5 years. Their brand and reputation are
decidedly _NOT_ assets. The opposite, actually.

If Zynga's executive team is smart, they're going to stop being a primary
publisher and acquirer and start working behind the scenes, like a consultant,
using their knowledge without doing brand-damage to the games they work on,
because even though 90% of people don't care about a game company's
reputation, the people who set trends do, and by 2014 no one will play Zynga
games.

~~~
patio11
Zynga didn't buy every other game this year and yet substantially all will
have a growth curve shaped like that, with the main question being height at
peak. I also think that zynga would lose in the poll "Who makes FarmVille?" to
Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Kim kardashian, even of you asked active
paying players of it rather than regular people.

~~~
jessedhillon
They have billboards up and down 101 advertising some -Ville game all the
time. I think the average person around here will know.

------
taligent
And ? Zynga wasn't buying an app. They were buying a team.

~~~
joering2
Not really. They were buying $120,000 per day of an in-app sales. DS was the
only OMGPOP hit; had they not succeed financially with DS, Zynga wouldn't have
had bought them.

------
loverobots
In other words, their timing was perfect. Doubt Zynga had much to do with
their downfall, another new game somewhere is gaining millions of users...

~~~
mertd
Looking at
([http://www.appdata.com/leaderboard/app_store_apps?id=3781-to...](http://www.appdata.com/leaderboard/app_store_apps?id=3781-top-
free-apps)), I'd say 100 floors, Rope'n Fly, Sponge Bob.

