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Comment by the_af | Hacker News Reader

Is it me or is this interview incredibly boring? Lots of words that say very little.

Also: Zynga (and its clones, like Vostu) used to be the cancer of gaming, rightly reviled by people like Jonathan Blow and Ian Bogost. From a predatory business angle maybe it was interesting to discuss, much like one would discuss the life of Jordan Belfort. Is Zynga still alive? That's one company that didn't deserve resuscitation.

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Zynga was acquired by Take2 in 2022 and is very much alive today.

IMHO the "predatory business" period of Zynga (e.g. the Tiny Tower vs Dream Heights) was prior to the arrival of team who executed the turnaround discussed in the interview.

By predatory I meant addiction driven free 2 play games where players are encouraged to spend money on "coins" or whatever to speed up the game, gain more turns, or skip boring parts, with a lot of grinding. A kind of gameplay that preys on addictive personality and relies on "whales" to spend money they don't have.

Have they changed this? What good games not following this scheme have they done since 2022? A sibling commenter mentioned Zynga now does mobile casino games, which would indicate they continue to be predatory.

I really think videogame companies like Zynga are not worth saving: they deserve to crash and burn.

The guy in the article is the one that resuscitated it! It's doing pretty well with mobile casino games these days.

Mobile casino games? Interesting, so Zynga just changed the skin of its games, and the basic premise of addictive behavior and "catching whales" remained intact? Yuck.

It's not just you. Was a waste of time.

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