Take-Two is acquiring mobile game giant Zynga for $12.7B | Hacker News Reader

Take-Two is acquiring mobile game giant Zynga for $12.7B

engadget.com

30 pointsdoppp18 comments

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So to put this into perspective:

YouTube: $1.7 billion

Instagram: $1 billion

Zynga, with groundbreaking games such as “wizard of oz slot”: $13 billion

https://www.zynga.com/games/

That’s just insane, whomever negotiated the sale of that corpse of a company either had some crazy inside pull at TTWO or should be made America’s top negotiator.

As for anyone unlucky enough to still be playing a Zynga game, ( I think words is still active ) the micro transactions frequency I can imagine is going to go through the roof.

Maybe the plan is to mine crypto using the userbase of something as aweful as that, otherwise the old Sony building must be valued at 12.5BB

To be fair , YouTube at the time was not profitable when it was bought . Zynga is not only profitable but it’s a public company .

At the time nobody knew would YouTube or Instagram succeed although they were growing like crazy and generally at the time valuations were lower. Nowadays everything is overvalued plus inflation is driving prices and valuations up in the last 2 years.

It's still unclear whether YouTube would have succeeded without Google. Bandwidth costs were crazy and probably still are now that they support 4k/8k video.

It probably would because investors would put more money into it until they build up their infrastructure but surely Google enabled them to scale enormously.

More context:

At the time of Facebook's acquisition of Instagram Zynga was trading higher than today (it went downhill from there losing over 80% in a few months). The market cap was $9bn.

Zynga was slow to transition from Facebook social gaming to mobile gaming. That's when King and Supercell stepped in. I think that Zynga was and is only old-school mobile gaming company left since King and Supercell got acquired and that's why Take-Two was willing to pay such premium price for it.

I'm the design lead on Woz Slots. I'm sorry it's not your cup of tea. Our players love it. :)

Zynga was still alive and worth nearly 13B?!!

GTA developers need to know how Zynga fucked up their golden eggs goose to avoid the same fate for GTA itself. My guess is that Zynga does not know what happened, as anybody that knew what was going on got frustrated and left a long ago.

Take-Two wants their mobile presence that's why they bought Zynga. The same story was with Activision-Blizzard when they bought King. Both Take-Two and Activison-Blizzard want to show their investors that they have strong mobile presence and strong mobile revenue.

Yes. I was just joking. Mobile is a big crazy market, and I can understand that everybody wants a chunk of it.

Same story from the Associated Press: https://apnews.com/article/technology-business-zynga-inc-aab...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but in 2020 Zynga had revenues of $2,506m and losses of $270.3m.

https://investor.zynga.com/node/16156/html

Most of zynga's losses are due to acquisitions they make, they are otherwise very profitable, recently they have been acting as venture capitalist than developer.

You made a mistake. It’s $2 billion revenue and $429 million loss in 2020, which seeven worse.

Edit: It’s $2 billion revenue and $429 million loss in 2020, which seems even worse.

But note that Zynga’s losses are primary due to acquisitions they make to expand. They spent roughly $2bn on acquisitions in 2020 and $750mn in 2021.

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