Zynga Closes Baltimore Office, Consolidates in Texas, New York

Zynga is cutting costs further by closing its Baltimore studio and consolidating its presence in New York City and Texas.

The moves follow a series of cost-cutting efforts that saw the closure of the Boston and Tokyo offices along with layoffs for about 5 percent of the company’s workforce. Those moves allowed the company to save $25 million last quarter.

In today’s changes, Zynga is consolidating the McKinney, Texas, office, which came out of the very successful Newtoy acquisition back in 2010. The company is moving the 30 or so employees there to Dallas, which is an hour away. The studio’s leaders and Newtoy’s founders Paul and David Bettner left in the last year as their “With Friends” line of games had a strong run under Zynga.

Zynga is also closing the Baltimore studio, which was behind CityVille 2. Zynga recently shut that game down after it didn’t live up to expectations as a follow-up to the original CityVille.

The company is also closing down one of its Austin offices and moving those employees to North Austin. Zynga’s New York City offices will also get moved to the company’s mobile studio in the city. Fewer than 1 percent of the company’s employees will be affected, Zynga said.

Zynga chief operations officer David Ko said in a statement:

“In an effort to leverage resources as we focus on creating franchises and driving profitability, Zynga has made changes to four of our US offices. We are closing the McKinney, Texas and downtown Austin offices and relocating those teams near-by to our existing Dallas and North Austin offices. And, we will be consolidating our NYC offices to move staff to our NYC mobile studio. Also, as a part of today’s changes, the Baltimore studio will be closed. While these decisions are always difficult, these steps will affect approximately 1% of our workforce and enable us to focus our resources on the most significant growth opportunities.”