Mark Pincus took the stage today at D10, and of course because Facebook is all people can talk about after its IPO two weeks ago, he got asked and asked and asked again about Zynga’s “attachment to Facebook.”
“Zynga is very tied to Facebook,” Kara Swisher brought up immediately, describing the two stocks as “tethered together.” Indeed, Zynga makes up 15% of Facebook’s revenue, and Facebook makes up most of Zynga’s. → Read More
Last we heard from Game Closure, the young startup had just turned down offers from Zynga and Facebook on its way to a $12 million raise from Highland Capital, Greylock, Benchmark, General Catalyst, and more. Even in spite of $100 million-plus offers, Game Closure CEO Michael Carter tells us that the startup is not eager to sell — not now, and not in the future. Yet, stealing high-placed executives at the big gaming companies? Not a problem.
Today, Game Closure, which is building a game development environment and SDK that makes it easy for developers to create, host, and deploy HTML5, cross-platform, multiplayer games, is announcing that it has poached Laurent Desegur away from Zynga, making the engineer and executive VP of Mobile Engineering. Until recently, Desegur had been CTO of Zynga Mobile, on top of being a veteran of Netflix, Big Fish Games, Amazon, Apple, and EA — to name a few. → Read More
Zynga and American Express are back together again in a new deal that will give prepaid card carriers ways to earn extra Farm Cash.
American Express, which has long been known for catering to high-end consumers, is moving downmarket. They’ve got a new platform called Serve, which is kind of a catchall service that supports many payment methods from traditional plastic cards with magnetic stripes to NFC to QR codes to basic online payments. The partnership with Zynga is meant to on-board new Amex customers and could give the credit card company the so-called FarmVille demographic.
“Zynga has a very large customer base,” said David Messenger, American Express’ executive vice president of enterprise growth. “This partnership isn’t for existing credit and charge card customers. It’s about trying to appeal to a new segment. These customers may be Millennials. They may be somewhat underserved in terms of banking. They may only use debit, cash and check.” → Read More
Is this Zynga’s next cash cow? It looks like Farmville 2.0 is already in beta testing under the name ‘Big Harvest’ in the Philippines, a tipster tells us.
As you can see, the game is way more three-dimensional, the crops are really lush and the graphics are just of a different quality level. There are several tweaks to the game play. Crops that are harvested can be turned into feed. Animals jump around after being fed. Players can take the milk and eggs from their animals and make pies.
Zynga declined to comment. “We don’t comment on what we may or may not be working on. What we can tell you is that we’re always looking for ways to bring players the best experience by listening to their feedback and continuously innovating on our games,” the company said in a statement. → Read More
Draw Something, the game that could do no wrong now seems like it can do little right, at least according to the blogosphere. There’s been a string of stories from virtually everyone saying that the OMGPOP acquisition is “haunting” Zynga because Draw Something’s daily active usage is down to 9.1 million daily active users from its peak of 14.6 million daily active users.
It’s funny how the press turns (and we know this too well). On the day we broke the story that Zynga was about to buy OMGPOP for what turned out to be $180 million, Business Insider said that our rumored price range was way too low. When the company sold, they then wrote a story citing Flurry’s CEO that OMGPOP had left $800 million on the table. → Read More
Zynga is taking yet another step away from its long line of casual sim “-Ville” games today with the launch of Bubble Safari. It’s an arcade game where a monkey named “Bubbles” has to shoot down pieces of fruit hanging above him to save his friends from poachers. If he matches several of the same kinds of fruit in a row, they’ll tumble down and get sorted into baskets by hummingbirds.
These shooter games are not new to the Facebook platform. With the rapid rise of Europe’s King.com and Germany’s Wooga on the back of games like Bubble Witch Saga and Bubble Island, it’s not surprising that Zynga would eventually launch its own take on the genre. → Read More
Draw Something has been a hot topic of late. About a month ago, OMGPOP, the company behind the hit game, was acquired by Zynga as the web gaming company attempts the migration over to mobile. The $180 million deal took Zynga’s daily user traffic up 25 percent, and even though Draw Something has been bleeding users, the motivation behind the acquisition circles back to Zynga’s transition to mobile. They bought talent, instead of trying to mimic it.
That, dear readers, is a Fly. But what about the game itself? → Read More
Stepping back from remarks a few weeks ago that suggested that Zynga was about to go on a shopping spree, Zynga chief executive Mark Pincus said the $180 million acquisition of Draw Something-maker OMGPOP was a “rare instance.”
Although OMGPOP was certainly a step up from anything Zynga has ever done before, Pincus said it didn’t represent a change in strategy from last year. He said Zynga will continue to be “prudent and bottom line-oriented” in its decisions today during the first-quarter earnings call. That’s a change in tone from an interview with Bloomberg a few weeks ago when he said that he expected to do “a few” OMGPOP-sized deals in the next three to five years. His remarks helped send shares tumbling 13.9 percent from the day the story appeared. → Read More
Zynga’s revenues rose 32 percent to $321 million in the first quarter, beating analysts’ estimates of $316.8 million in revenue and earnings of 5 cents a share excluding stock-based expenses. Bookings* came in at a record $329 million, up 15 percent over the year before, and up 7 percent compared to the previous quarter — meaning Zynga didn’t see that seasonal decline in revenues that Facebook did.
The company said revenue growth was driven by the launch of games like Hidden Chronicles and Castleville and its increasing footprint on mobile platforms. Overall, Zynga posted a net loss of $85.4 million, mostly because of stock-based expenses. Excluding those expenses of $133.9 million, Zynga would have had earnings per share of 6 cents or $47 million. That would be down 38 percent from the year before. The company also raised its annual guidance to $1.425 billion to $1.5 billion in bookings, up from $1.35 to $1.45 billion. Shares are down 1 percent in after-hours trading to $9.33. → Read More
Zynga and Facebook are ever gradually trying to separate from each other. It’s working — sort of?
Facebook said today that 15 percent of its revenue in the first quarter came from either advertising or payments tied to Zynga games.* That’s down from 19 percent during the same time a year earlier.
About 11 of the 15 percent in revenue was from the 30 percent revenue share Facebook takes from transactions in Zynga games on the platform or advertising that Zynga directly paid Facebook for. Another 4 percent comes from advertising shown alongside Zynga content.
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Tell your friends to hit the App Store or Android market, there’s a new update for Draw Something out today with some cool new features. Now you can chat with friends while you play, save your drawings to your phone or tablet, and share those drawings straight to Facebook or Twitter. Zynga, who recently acquired Draw Something and its developer OMGPOP for over $180 million, hopes these social and viral improvements will restart growth as the app has started bleeding users over the last few weeks.
Despite Zynga’s notoriety for designing games to maximize addictiveness and the amount users spend, there’s been no tweaks to Draw Something’s virtual goods and uncompetitive style. Instead, former OMGPOP CEO and new Zynga Mobile New York General Manager Dan Porter told The Guardian the game was successful because “it’s very chilled, very zen”. → Read More
Zynga is bolstering its brand advertising efforts by bringing on Julie Shumaker from RockYou as the company’s new vice president of North American sales. She’ll report to Jeff Karp, Zynga’s chief marketing and revenue officer.
The move should help cover at least one recent vacancy. The company’s global director of brand advertising, Manny Anekal, recently defected to mobile advertising startup Kiip to serve as chief operating officer.
This is a key time for Zynga’s nascent advertising efforts as the company puts its weight behind a new gaming destination off Facebook. With its own gaming platform, Zynga should be able to earn a greater revenue share from ads than it has historically. Last year, Zynga earned just $47.1 million or 5.7 percent of its total revenues from advertising. The lion’s share came from virtual currency sales. → Read More
Zynga has just released a new S-1 in connection with its secondary offering. The company is looking to sell up to 43 million shares (42,969,153 shares to be exact). Zynga’s CEO Mark Pincus will sell 15 percent of his shares, which is worth around $227 million based on yesterday’s stock price. Pincus’ voting power post-sale will go from 36.5 percent to 35.9 percent, according to the filing.
Investors IVP, SilverLake, Union Square Ventures, Google, Reid Hoffman are also selling in the offering, as is board member Jeffrey Katzenberg. Owen Van Natta, General Counsel Reggis Davis, COO John Schappert and CFO Dave Wehner are selling shares as well (see chart below).
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In September, social game developer Idle Games launched on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco, declaring that they were on a mission to become “the Pixar of casual games.” The startup’s first title, Idle Worship, is a throw-back to Peter Molyneux and EA’s Black & White, except, instead of finding it on a PC, Idle Worship will make its home on that social network everyone’s talking about.
Like Black & White, gamers get to play the role of a god, lording over villagers on an island in whatever way you choose — you can be a vengeful god, or a forgiving one. Both in its first title, and in the games it plans in the future, Idle Games is looking to provide a better alternative to the stale social games already out there produced by the bigs like Zynga. → Read More
Is Zynga going to leave Facebook to start its own site for gamers? Whispers about this have circulated for years, and today we have an answer: yes and no. Yes, Zynga is starting its own site for games. But no, it’s not leaving Facebook.
At least not for the foreseeable future. Instead, it’s launching a new platform designed to house both its own games and ones from other developers. And, you log in with your Facebook identity, and you pay using Facebook Credits.
The site, available at Zynga.com, is a social gamer’s dream. The types of social channels that Zynga has been testing and refining are all in place. And then some. Instead of just pulling in your Facebook friends, it includes ways to become friends with other people on the site who you’re not connected to on Facebook. People who you want to play with, anyway, that it calls zFriends. → Read More
As mentioned in yesterday’s earnings call, Zynga revealed that the company’s zCloud, its private cloud infrastructure has been scaling significantly in the past year. At the start of 2011, only 20% of Zynga’s daily active users (DAU) were in the zCloud. A year later, nearly 80% of Zynga games’ DAU reside in zCloud, and 20% in the public cloud (powered by AWS). Today the company is revealing additional information about the zCloud and how much data is being transmitted through its infrastructure.
Zynga has been quietly investing in powering up the zCloud over the past few years, explains Allan Leinwand, Zynga’s CTO of Infrastructure. As Leinwand explains, the infrastructure looks, feels, and operates similar to the AWS public cloud, but allows for greater performance, scale and reliability. zCloud physically resides in Zynga’s private datacenters and is designed specifically for social games in terms of availability and performance. And Zynga has created tailored automation tools for large server environments and built custom monitoring and management tools. → Read More
After announcing a licensing deal with Hasbro last week, Zynga is debuting another licensing agreement. The social gaming giant is teaming up with game developer Slingo to license casual game Slingo; and launch a social Facebook title Zynga Slingo today. This is the first time Zynga has licensed a game title to date, as the company has been churning out original titles over the past few years.
Created in 1995, Slingo is played by over 55 million people across free online games, retail, mobile, casino slots and other platforms. Additionally, over 50 million Slingo games have been downloaded and almost five billion games of Slingo have been played online. In case you aren’t familiar with Slingo, players spin and match numbers to fill the card to win the game. The goal, similar to Bingo, is to create Slingos which include five matched numbers in a row, column, or even diagonal.
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As we mentioned in our coverage of Zynga’s fourth quarter earnings, mobile has been one of the fast-growing parts of Zynga’s business. On the company’s earnings call, CEO and founder Marc Pincus revealed that mobile users have grown five-fold to 15 million daily active users in 2011. That’s up from 13 million in December.
That’s an addition of 2 million users in the past month, and an addition of over 5 million users over the course of the quarter. In the third quarter, Zynga had 9.9 million daily active users for its mobile games. → Read More
Social gaming giant Zynga just released its fourth quarter earnings, the company’s first earnings release as a public company. Analysts expected earnings of $0.03 per share on revenue of $302 million. Zynga beat the street, with revenue coming in at $311.2 million for the fourth quarter of 2011, an increase of 59% compared to the fourth quarter of 2010. In terms of Diluted EPS, Zynga took s a loss ($1.22) for the fourth quarter of 2011 compared to $0.05 for the fourth quarter of 2010. Non-GAAP EPS was $0.05 for the fourth quarter of 2011 compared to $0.09 for the fourth quarter of 2010.
CEO and Founder Mark Pincus said in a release, “2011 was another milestone year for Zynga’s mission of connecting the world through games. We are seeing social games and more broadly play become one of the most popular pastimes on web and mobile. Zynga set new records in the year in terms of audience size, revenues and bookings. We saw great momentum in mobile and advertising and ended the year with a strong pipeline of new games. We are excited about the opportunities in front of us to continue delighting our current players and to bring play to millions of new people.” → Read More
Last week, the developers at NimbleBit (makers of iOS Game of the Year, Tiny Tower) accused Zynga of copying them with its new game, Dream Heights. Now, it’s happening again. This time, the accusation comes from Buffalo Studios, which says that the gaming giant copied its flagship title Bingo Blitz with its launch of Zynga Bingo.
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