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Comment by jmduke | Hacker News Reader

It's hard for me to critique or analyze Zynga from an unbiased perspective.

There's no question that what they were able to create this monstrous flywheel of engagement around a strong core concept but from my vantage point (read: I know they printed money with FarmVille and CityVille and have more or less floundered in the past year), they were only really good at the "let's take this already successful concept/hook and turn it into a cash cow" side of the equation.

Has Zynga had any successes in the past twelve months? Were they able to break into mobile at all beyond paying $180M for Draw Something?

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I think Empires and Allies is making a lot of money currently. It is in the top grossing charts for quite a while. The game is quite good and targets a mid-core audience. https://zynga.com/games/empires-and-allies

They have a few of the top games in the social casino category on both iOS and Android. I work there and make some of the slots games. If you're a fan of gambling they're actually really good games even though you're not playing for real money.

https://zynga.com/games/zynga-poker https://zynga.com/games/free-slots https://zynga.com/games/wizard-oz-slots

You have to take FarmVille and CityVille's so called "success" with a grain of salt. Social games companies don't measure success by revenue, they measure it by daily active users (DAU). What you don't see is how much money they spend on advertising to attract users to the game. I know at one point, they were spending much more per user than the game was bringing in. You also don't see the churn rate, which is typically high in social games.

There's a real possibility Zynga was never as successful as it appeared to be, from a cash perspective.

>"There's a real possibility Zynga was never as successful as it appeared to be, from a cash perspective."

No need for speculation, they went public in 2011. You can read their financial statements.

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