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OMGPOP Team Tried To Buy Back Its Site, But Zynga Killed It Instead
- dlgeek 13y agoI've heard they're losing their best talent left, right, and center. Between that and stuff like this, I wonder how much longer Zynga can keep going at this rate?
- est 13y agoI never understand the logic behind acquire-and-shutdown process. Like Google's last decade of shopping and killing spree, not long ago Yahoo bought Astrid and shutdown million users. Are there any significant business reasoning I am missing?
- samweinberg 13y agoWhen a company acquires another and then shuts it down, the reasoning usually has something to do with intellectual properties or acqui-hiring the employees.
- chiph 13y agoOr buying the customer base, if they think the customers can be moved to their platform.
- redthrowaway 13y agoExcept in this case, they laid everyone off. Also, Zynga doesn't seem all that interested in acquiring IP. I imagine this was just a fuck up on their part.
- rmc 13y agoThey're keeping Draw Something
- meowface 13y agoIf they are, that really seems like a nasty move. Buy a company, then shut down all their products and services, fire all of them, then keep all of their IP and ensure they can't use it again? I suppose it's not exactly theft, since they got paid something up front, but it's still unfortunate.
- workbench 13y agoThey didn't expect Draw Something to drop off so much faster than their usual games. Probably didn't understand that Draw Something isn't even a game when you think about it, so didn't really have a competitive angle and became tiresome quickly.
- angryasian 13y agoTo remove another competitor from the market
- DarkStar851 13y agoThat would be considered illegal by US trade laws if it could be proven or was sufficiently argumented. Unfortuantely I don't believe the courts would accept a plea case after the aquisition had gone through. The big mobile carriers get into this sort of fight a lot though.
- dspillett 13y ago> That would be considered illegal by US trade laws if it could be proven or was sufficiently argumented. But there are many other explanations which (while not as likely in the opinions of many observers) would at very least create a large slice of "reasonable doubt" (and occasionally actually be true!).
- DarkStar851 13y agoThat's a fair point, I think most courts would consider it an acceptable buyout within reasonable doubt, largely because of the rest of the huge competition in this market and the previous owners accepting the deal.
- devindotcom 13y agoYeah, it'd be illegal unless you were to truly value these innovators as potential contributors and then just not give a shit until this potentially powerful and creative company (that agreed to the sale of course) is a distant memory.
- shiike 13y agoThe current Zynga team has another higher priority (revitalize its business in some way.) and rather than spending time to negotiate the buy-back deal, I guess they just chose to shut the service down for time and resource saving. It's a typical nature for a large company who always optimizes their operation for priority.. If you really love your product, the best and only way is not to sell.
- joeblau 13y agoZynga should have sold it back for 300M-400M.
- eupharis 13y agoOr at least something. If I were a shareholder, I'd be irate. Maybe Zynga has some grand master plan for Draw Something and whatnot. But as of now, this looks like executives taking a massive, unnecessary loss in order to cover their own incompetence.
- kevingadd 13y ago"These team members wanted whatever Zynga was willing to sell, even if that didn’t include the more valuable Draw Something assets or user data. Even more employees offered to work on OMGPOP.com for free. However, Zynga said this would all take too much legal work and wouldn’t agree to sell anything."
- anigbrowl 13y agoThis is a huge red flag. To me that says there's something that would emerge during the due diligence process that Zynga does not want people to know about. If I was a gambler I'd short them hard in response to this, my hunch is that the firm is on its way to de-listing and collapse.
- kevingadd 13y agoDo you think that it would be related to the reasons for shutting down OMGPOP operations? That is, they found some nasty skeletons in the closet, and the best way to hide them is to wind down everything OMGPOP-related so that they don't have to file reports about it and it doesn't ever get audited?
- anigbrowl 13y agoI couldn't say, and my comment above is honestly baseless speculation, just a very strong hunch. I haven't read any of their public filings on that acquisition so weight that appropriately.
- JoshGlazebrook 13y agoI still think it was a mistake to buy OMGPOP. Draw Something was one of those games that you get addicted to, but it only lasts a week or two. Eventually it becomes saturated in that game market, and unfortunately for Zynga they bought it when it was in the middle of this process.
- jackschultz 13y agoI don't think you'll find many people here who disagree with you there. Since these apps by default are stand alone, so they can't leverage large user bases as well as web apps. And people don't really feel loyalty to companies and their games, they just like to play what's fun.
- jlgreco 13y agoThe question I have is, if OMGPOP had been left to their own devices, is it likely that they would have been able to churn out more short-term hits? It seems plausible to me that they would have been, which implies to me that companies that are like OMGPOP are worth more independent than if they are acquihired. The process of acquihiring such companies could very well be self-defeating. If you try to buy "it", you don't actually get "it".
- dubfan 13y agoHow can you reliably turn out hits? If you could, the one-hit wonder wouldn't exist. We'd only have hit machines.
- anigbrowl 13y agoThe very existence of the term 'hit machine' implies that some people are able to do so reliably. This is certainly true in music.
- gadders 13y agoYou think? VC funds, record labels, games studios are all hits-run businesses. Of course some of them make profits, but none can guarantee hits.
- DarkStar851 13y agoCopyright issues aside, am I the only one seriously thinking about writing an emulator for the server-side component of a few of their games? I mean I'm sad to see them go dark like I'm sure a lot of you are, and it sucks that such a talented team's work is essentially going to waste, but I'm REALLY going to miss OMGPOP.com's rendition of Pool! It was and is my favorite Pool game with Miniclip's coming in as a close second. I don't want Zynga to sue my ass, but it's almost worth it. Would anyone else be interested in collaborating? Obviously I can't emulate all the games myself.
- DarkStar851 13y agoShould mention I mostly write PHP, but my Scala should be up to scratch for this too. Or C#, perhaps even Java (shudder). I've got some free time so if someone wanted to create the base in Ruby I'd be happy to assist.
- workbench 13y agoServes them right really, what on earth did they think was going to happen
- Bjoern 13y agoDoes being bought by Zynga automatically mean that they will close it down for good? I don't think so.
- SimHacker 13y agoI wanted to launch a Shartcasting site, but OMGPOOP.com was taken.