Zynga Courts Hollywood, Nabs DreamWorks CEO Katzenberg

[Antari]

I just felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of dollars cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
I fear something terrible has happened.

This can only end badly for my wallet at some point. It is the start of another evil empire.

Only if you play Zynga games.

With them making this much money. Give it a little bit of time, all games will be made like Zynga games. Its truely a sad sad day.

I wouldn't say ALL games, just games from companies like Activision and the other companies who put emphasis more on profit than creativity.

Give them time ... once they smell the money. We're all screwed.

I don't know, perhaps I'm too optimistic about this. But something tells me Zynga will eventually go belly up given the fact that, as one person already said, Mark Pincus is an idiot with a lot of money... and an evil one at that.

Funny, you just described most of the CEO's in the gaming industry. With the amounts of money they've made off of people making bad decisions. Plenty of other people will be more than willing to make a bad decision without thinking because all they see is money to be made in it. Quality and Care don't exist in an industry driven by the bottom line.

 

[Sean Strife]

I just felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of dollars cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
I fear something terrible has happened.

This can only end badly for my wallet at some point. It is the start of another evil empire.

Only if you play Zynga games.

With them making this much money. Give it a little bit of time, all games will be made like Zynga games. Its truely a sad sad day.

I wouldn't say ALL games, just games from companies like Activision and the other companies who put emphasis more on profit than creativity.

Give them time ... once they smell the money. We're all screwed.

I don't know, perhaps I'm too optimistic about this. But something tells me Zynga will eventually go belly up given the fact that, as one person already said, Mark Pincus is an idiot with a lot of money... and an evil one at that.

Funny, you just described most of the CEO's in the gaming industry. With the amounts of money they've made off of people making bad decisions. Plenty of other people will be more than willing to make a bad decision without thinking because all they see is money to be made in it. Quality and Care don't exist in an industry driven by the bottom line.

Which does NOTHING to solidify the status of video games as a legitimate artform.

 

[Steve the Pocket]

So instead of cheap cash-in 3D games based on DreamWorks cartoons, we're going to get cheap cash-in casual games on Facebook based on DreamWorks cartoons? As we say on the Internet, nothing of value was lost.

"Jeffrey redefined storytelling when he launched DreamWorks Animation," said Mark Pincus the CEO of Zynga CEO in a statement. "He turned an independent studio into a brand name and his vision will be an asset as we work to define the future of play."

Wow. Pincus is a moron. With too much money. Always a bad mix.

Dreamworks' animation department started life as Pacific Data Images [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Data_Images], which is Carl Rosendahl's and Richard Chuang's baby. Like Pixar, PDI was a synthetic imaging research company, and its demo reels showed off its rendering tech. All Katzenberg did was give PDI a large contract to do a movie, and then later acquire them. He contributed nothing to the tech development, and would probably stare blankly at you if you mentioned the names Phong or Gouraud.

So, yeah. Really great "get" for Zynga there.

Because knowledge of 3D rendering techniques are really essential to good storytelling. ಲ_ಲ Seriously, though, DreamWorks Animation is not just PDI with a new name; their first film was tradition hand-drawn animation, and they made three others after that. PDI got folded into them the same way Pixar got folded into Disney; the difference is that DreamWorks stopped making traditional animated films altogether and stopped name-dropping PDI.

I don't know, perhaps I'm too optimistic about this. But something tells me Zynga will eventually go belly up given the fact that, as one person already said, Mark Pincus is an idiot with a lot of money... and an evil one at that.

Funny, you just described most of the CEO's in the gaming industry. With the amounts of money they've made off of people making bad decisions. Plenty of other people will be more than willing to make a bad decision without thinking because all they see is money to be made in it. Quality and Care don't exist in an industry driven by the bottom line.

"Evil idiot with a lot of money" would probably describe the CEO of pretty much every company, period, at this point.