4 ms·

With these kinds of games I really surprised Zynga didn't provide a more graceful wind down. As the article suggests, there must be HUGE numbers of people with

With these kinds of games I really surprised Zynga didn't provide a more graceful wind down. As the article suggests, there must be HUGE numbers of people with real emotional attachment to their characters/pets, who almost by definition are Zynga's most loyal customers. SURELY a business decision which exclusively hurts those who are stakeholders in the games you produce is, from a long term perspective, just a horrible move for customer loyalty and reputation. If I'd put 4 years into a pet on Petville, only to have the game basically deleted from under my nose, there is no way I'd ever become involved in anything Zynga does again. [Disclaimer, I've never actually played any Zynga games, so this is based on second hand conversions/observations]

general_failure 14y ago
Most of the comments are made up.
patio11 14y ago
It's possible that some of these games had paying user retention numbers such that maintaining customer loyalty among the holdouts was not a hard requirement. I don't have a convenient way to look up MAUs at the moment, but many apps languish at say 10k. That would imply a few hundred paying customers. The majority of them would be worth whole tens of dollars in LTV. One of my rare compliments to Zynga: they aren't stupid and it is highly, highly unlikely that the live teams' business analysts made a worse decision based on the data than an outsider would make based on a press release.
- robryan 14y ago
  I think it would be a straight numbers decision as you guess. A lot of companies would worry about how this would impact those high value and long term customers and how it could effect retention in other games and future projects. I think Zynga is passed that point now though (if that ever was a concern for them, they have never really been a games company a rational person would have a strong connection to). Pretty much all the big name MMOs released in the past 10 years have gracefully downsized and maintained maintenance for the player base.
Too 14y ago
Not only 4 years, probably plenty of money also.

general_failure 14y ago

Most of the comments are made up.

patio11 14y ago

It's possible that some of these games had paying user retention numbers such that maintaining customer loyalty among the holdouts was not a hard requirement. I don't have a convenient way to look up MAUs at the moment, but many apps languish at say 10k. That would imply a few hundred paying customers. The majority of them would be worth whole tens of dollars in LTV. One of my rare compliments to Zynga: they aren't stupid and it is highly, highly unlikely that the live teams' business analysts made a worse decision based on the data than an outsider would make based on a press release.

robryan 14y ago
I think it would be a straight numbers decision as you guess. A lot of companies would worry about how this would impact those high value and long term customers and how it could effect retention in other games and future projects. I think Zynga is passed that point now though (if that ever was a concern for them, they have never really been a games company a rational person would have a strong connection to). Pretty much all the big name MMOs released in the past 10 years have gracefully downsized and maintained maintenance for the player base.

Too 14y ago

Not only 4 years, probably plenty of money also.