![]() But Gibeau brought strategic mobile experience that helped transform how and what Zynga delivers to players, and recruited EA colleagues including Bernard Kim, now Zynga President. It’s not easy for any company to craft success after years of failed attempts. Their quantitative tools and capabilities were just mind boggling.” ‘Ruthless prioritization’ “We brought with us production techniques that we knew from EA and married it with the fantastic data science and product management that Zynga had. “I had just gone through the experience at EA where we went from heroes to zeroes to heroes again, so that was fresh in my mind,” Gibeau says to TIME. ![]() Pincus’s decision to bring in Gibeau, the former head of EA Mobile who took over as Zynga CEO in March 2016, paved the way for the longtime struggling company to rise again. He returned as CEO in 2015 and undertook a $100 million cost reduction program, laying off nearly a fifth of the workforce to restore focus on Zynga’s core franchises. But the new CEO’s slate of unproven games and costly mistakes with the company’s biggest brands sent the company in the wrong direction, according to Pincus. Zynga founder and chair, Mark Pincus, stepped aside as CEO and brought in new leadership to gain traction in mobile. Read more: ‘Cube Crawls’ and ‘Frat Bro’ Culture: California’s Huge Activision Blizzard Lawsuit Alleges Yet Another Toxic Workplace in the Video Game Industryīy the summer of 2013, the company had lost more than half of its monthly active users. They weren’t ready and the games they had on mobile weren’t very good.” “But once other publishers started to create quality content, Zynga’s game fell off pretty rapidly. “It was a company that prized marketing and analytics and hadn’t spent a lot of time on creativity, which worked when their competition was nascent,” said Creutz. This left plenty of room for up-and-comers like Candy Crush Saga and Clash of Clans to rise. The games industry rapidly shifted from social networks towards the burgeoning mobile market and Zynga failed to pivot fast enough. Zynga’s market value dropped to below $2 billion, and it languished for years at less than half of its previous value.Īs smartphone ownership grew, games moved away from Facebook and Facebook moved away from games. However, less than a year after its IPO, the company’s value plunged. When it went public in December 2011, its market value soared to $10 billion, which was four times that of games industry veteran Electronic Arts (EA), makers of popular game franchises like FIFA and Madden NFL, according to data provided by Cowen senior analyst Doug Creutz. At the height of its popularity, it comprised nearly a fifth of Facebook’s revenue with more than 300 million monthly active users. Zynga, founded in 2007, pioneered social gaming.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |