Did Draw Something by Omgpop really cost $140,000?
pricetaghq.com
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Really interesting. I do feel there are a lot more intangible costs that are not taken into account. It is more like the cost to recreate an existing product. Building a product is like looking for gold in the woods. It will require a lot of blind walking until finding the gold. And then others can just take shortcuts to follow. The original cost is much higher.
So I guess the question is that since Zynga could've recreated Draw Something for about $140,000, should they have just done that instead of buying OMGPOP. :-)
Namely, cost of production /= value.
Social graph, brand, talent, assets, parternships. There's a huge list of intangibles, the details of which the public isn't necessarily privy to, that Zynga acquired along with OMGPOP. To simplify it down to just cost of production is an easy way to make any acquisition seem foolish (ie Instagram), but isn't fair justice to the deal.
There's more at play than code and design.
The cost of building that game are also the lessons they learned along the way. Also, for a team of developers, server administrators, project managers, I'd imagine their salaries for their services alone not including office space , computers and services would've cost way more than that.
I think this is a great article. OMGPOP didn't have the advantage of hindsight in building their product. I really doubt they knew what they were doing. Their advantage was being agile and adjusting their game and business model to how the crowd was playing the game.