Displaying items by tag: Zynga

Shortly after Zynga's publication that they are testing the Bitcoin payments within their online games, news arrived that one more American online store has done the same.

Yesterday we talked about how the social network gaming company Zynga was having a rough time of things. Now we are hearing that they could be pulling off a desperation move by suing another company over trademark infringement. The culprit here is the developer behind the adult app Bang with Friends (who has the same name as the app). Now, while we could see Zynga getting a little upset over the title for a few reasons not the least of which is associating this title with their kid friendly games that have the same naming scheme. However to try and claim trademark infringement because of the “with friends” part is a little much.

Every day since Zynga, the company best known for Farmville and similar games for wasting time, put their shares on stock market last year, they kept on falling into deeper trouble every day. Stock prices are falling, earnings decline, and the company was abandoned by several key members, disgruntled by a direction in which the company is going, but also with the strict hand of Mark Pincus, founder and until recently CEO of Zynga. Pincus earlier this month stepped down from CEO position, leaving it to Don Mattrick, a former Microsoft's chief for Xbox.

When Don Mattrick left Microsoft for Zynga many were under the impression that Zynga must have made a pretty nice offer to lure him away from Microsoft. We are pretty sure that this is probably true, but there might be another reason that Mattrick left Microsoft as their Interactive Entertainment Business President. Back in 2010 Don Mattrick tried to get Microsoft to buy Zynga to help bolster what he saw as a big lack in social media games.

In its efforts to reduce operating costs, Zynga has announced the shutdown of more than ten of their less successful games. In all a total of 11 titles will be shut down which has caused some serious despair among some of the more addicted players. One player commented on the announcement of shutting down PetVille “My pet is named after my real pet, and has the best mansion! PLEASE DON’T DO THIS!!!!”. Maybe he can try playing with his real pet now.

Most of us probably remember having our news feeds on Facebook bombarded with status updates of the once prolific game, Farmville. Perhaps, like me, you even played the game for a period of time, enjoying the dull, repetitive “grinding” pace of progress in the game. For a time, it was enjoyable, and very popular, as have several other of Zynga's games. However, despite their original success with Farmville, Zynga's stocks have been constantly slipping for the past several months.

Just as I started to notice fewer requests to all-kinds-of-Ville games on Facebook, Zynga announced they will launch a sequel to CityVille. They don’t want to tell much about the game, but they revealed “It has all the features in CityVille that players love – from neighbor visits and crews to buildables – blended with some of the innovations we introduced in CastleVille and FarmVille 2 such a crafting and 3D graphics.”

Zynga, the social gaming company mostly known for their Texas Hold'em Poker on Facebook is looking to become a serious gaming studio. They have hired Mortal Kombat co-creator John Tobias. He will join their studios in San Diego as creative director. He was not the only one to come to Zynga, Electronic Arts and Midway veteran Mark Turmell has also arrived. Zynga did not stop at new personnel, but they also picked up San Mateo, California based studio A Bit Lucky. All employees from this mid-core studio will be transferred to Zynga's HQ near San Francisco.

A couple of days ago we covered some interesting news about EA and what appear to be steps to set themselves up for a buyout. In the original article we talked about the fact that they are buying back their own stock from investors as well as trimming down staff which puts them at a lower financial liability. At the same time they were doing all of this EA was talking up the future of mobile gaming especially in conjunction with the Windows 8 ecosystem. This happened in conjunction with OnLive selling to an unnamed company. Now we are hearing that EA owned mobile gaming company PopCap is cutting roughly 12% of the staff in North America.