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“an analytics company masquerading as a games company.” I'm wondering if that was responsible for it's downfall? I get that gaming is somewhat of a hit-driven
by pbreit 11y ago
“an analytics company masquerading as a games company.”
I'm wondering if that was responsible for it's downfall? I get that gaming is somewhat of a hit-driven business but not nearly like, say, movies. Incumbents have humongous distribution advantages. I'm amazed that Zynga relinquished its commanding position so thoroughly and so rapidly.
- shostack 11y agoI've always wondered if Zynga would have been more successful now if they had pivoted and turned into an analytics and monetization SaaS platform with consulting services. They are clearly masters at the mechanics and psychology of this, and the technical implementation as well. When your mine runs dry, there's still often quite a bit of money to be made selling shovels to the other miners.
- fasteddie 11y agoI'm a former Z employee -- one of my friends worked on proposals for a spinoff of the analytics platform, but he never got anywhere. Obviously this is very hard to to do for a number of reasons. Mixpanel employees more salespeople than they do engineers or designers, and Zynga is still 2-3x their valuation just on the core games business.
- shostack 11y agoThat's really interesting--thanks for sharing those insights. Zynga is in a hits-based industry, so having a reliable recurring revenue from a b2b SaaS product could enable them more flexibility with their approach on the gaming side from a pricing an user acquisition standpoint. But of course I'm speculating without any hard numbers. Sounds like people much more informed than I am have decided it is not a valid opportunity, and given how far it is from their core business, I can easily see why. Thanks again.