EA: Zynga Has "Dropped to Their Knees"

[The Random One]

...Why is there a wall in the middle of the marathon track?

EA is doing an Oylmpic decathlon? Well christ, by the 6th/7th event they'll be on their knees begging for mercy aswell. Even Activision'll do better than them and they can only only just scrape a pentathlon team together. At a hilariously large stretch.

Aaaaand Valve is the winner! Closely followed by indie devs GO PLAY BASTION!

It only looks that way because Valve is almost an entire lap behind the indies.

 

[Weaver]

And EA is diversifying by making everything an FPS or third person shooter?

 

[nexus]

I don't even care anymore. I should care that this is still a company that employs workers, who will get the shaft.. but all I can muster is "Bring your experience to a more fruitful endeavor this time."

Zynga games are well and truly evil. Just like Facebook. They're designed to be extremely anti-social, and you are encouraged to use your "friends" as mere resources to continue playing. Not even MMOs go so far, MMO's are typically people that agree to work together until you decide you've had your fun and stop. Zynga games just exploit the "resource" indefinitely, because it's tied in with the stupid Orwellian Facebook nonsense that never goes away and wishes to integrate into everything you do.

Hint:

YouTube, Twitter, Facebook

You - Twit - Face

 

[ResonanceSD]

"Hello Kettle? Yes, this is Pot. YOU'RE BLACK!"

Meanwhile, the rest of the gaming world is trying to hold in the laughter. It's quite hard.

 

[viranimus]

Yes... Social networked based gaming is going to die a horrible, miserable death, alone in a dark room at the bottom of the ocean. Welcome to 2008, Its ok that your tardy to the party but its nice you finally arrived.

 

[SnakeoilSage]

I make it a point never to trust words filtered through the speaker's own foot.

 

[WhiteTigerShiro]

I'm sorry, but i'm not sure EA is the type of company that can be trusted to give solid advice on things like financial success...

Exactly why is a company that's seen massive financial success not be trusted to give solid advice on financial success?

 

[surg3n]

The problem with Zynga and EA, is they see everything as a potential market - every aspect of life is a potential market to them. Social gaming should have stuck with advertising for revenue, and mobile gaming is going to suffer soon too, because expecting people to buy a game, then spend money on it to get anything decent, that can't last long.

The bottom line is that gamers tastes change, gaming addictions are very temporary when there are so many options out there. Most recently I'm addicted to Ski Safari on the iPad - it cost £0.69 and it doesn't expect me to pay any more money for gadgets or gameplay features. That's why it's awesome, the upgrades/powerups have to be earned, not held to ransom by the publishers. The people who play Farmville, well there's no reason why they wouldn't enjoy about a million other games, games that are cheap or free, games that don't rely on constant funding, games that aren't shallow. It was bound to happen eventually, there will always be an alternative that's better and cheaper, constantly, the trick is to maximise the time when your product is popular and make the most of it - instead, Zynga went and assumed they owned the gaming world, could do what they like, could take other peoples designs without concern, could sell shares when it benefitted them the most. Zynga is a husk of a company now, I feel bad for the developers who put their faith in a bunch of dickheads who I'd happily see locked up.

It's a good thing for indi developers, that's for sure - Zynga was damaging the industry, and now there is that space for another flyaway success, maybe several, indi developers will start to trust the iOS platform with their ideas, and the Facebook platform has a lot of space for innovation now. Ideas might center around providing good gamplay, rather than mugging us. Whether Zynga is gone for good, or just severely struggling, it's a good thing. Maybe some of Zynga's developers should break away and start their own proper game company, with proper games that you only have to pay for once, or are paid for through advertising.
Zynga dug too deeply, and too greedily, into the wallets of single moms, the unemployed and high-school kids.

 

[mooncalf]

I wonder if Zynga's style of games hasn't been a huge benefit to the gaming community by acting as a footboard for people who weren't gamers (but were social) previously to discover gaming and the wide variety of frankly better games out there. I mean, is this just the pool of new gamers introduced through social media drying up as they graduate onto bigger better things? people could be getting bored I suppose, but I believe in conservation of gamerism.

 

[Bloodstain]

EA says something right: "Duh, obvious!
Anyone else says something right: "Yup, that's correct."

Jesus, people, give them due credit.
He is absolutely right there, and I am still somewhat happy that Zynga goes down. I feel for all those people losing their jobs but it's good to show the world that microtransaction-based games won't work on a long-term basis. I just hope those losing jobs can find some new work, maybe at other game companies.
Then again, Zynga did introduce many people to gaming...so yeah, it wasn't all bad.

And I hope EA takes the road of improvement after all that hatred towards them lest they become another failing company in a few years. EA can do good things, it's just that bad things made them a lot of money thus far -- and no businessman in his right mind would take risks if what they're doing right now is already making money. But since that changed somewhat, they may go in good and new directions.

 

[Strazdas]

I think EA is attacking Zymga so much because EA started to loose the race for worst company ever as Zynga qicly took the lead and EA is panicking.
Also both stocks plummet, and im dancing and dancing....