I actually think they're doing a great impression of a dam-buster bomb. Big spin up, lots of motion, then a huge drop to where it is currently skimming across the surface of the water, where any tiny bit of rock or a boat could stop it reaching it's target and blow it to little bits. My moneys on the fishing trawler.
Business is business, but I'm surprised that 60,000 active users isn't enough to keep it running. It it really that high-maintenance?
Though I think the Techcrunch [http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/30/zynga-shuts-down-petville-fishville-mafia-wars-2/] put their finger on the worst part of it.
If you'd spent years tending your virtual aquarium only to have it disappear, you can imagine how disappointed or angry you'd be. Comments from gamers on the shutdown notices included things like "my daughter is heartbroken" and "Please don't remove petville. I been playing for 4 yrs. and I'M going to miss my pet Jaime....why do you want cause depression for me and others. Why do you want to kill my pet?"
I feel sorry for those people. Not their fault they attached emotional weight to something without understanding the transience and capriciousness of Internet business bubbles.
Aside from a general urge to kick Zynga while they are down, it's a damn shame companies would rather kill the game + data rather than release it to the public. Like City of Heroes. Why murder it instead of setting it free? That's just hateful.
Competition with themselves. Why would people pay for your "Petville Resurrection" later down the line when they can already play the original Petville you released for free?
But it feels like a logic failure. If they are killing it because of low population/income, why care? It has been judged a losing investment. If they desire to retain that population, why kill the game at all; those people are still paying customers.
Unless that population is non-profitable, it's destroying your customers investment simply because you can. To piss on your customers like this and expect them to sign up for your newer title? It defies belief.
Well I don't think Zynga has ever had a problem pissing on its customers, or expecting them to come back afterwards. The data has shown that they will. But anyway, they were put in kind of a hard spot. They've lost money and had to lay off a bunch of employees, so they couldn't afford to maintain all their games, even some that were still moderately profitable like Petville. From the wording of the article it sounds like they made the decision to cut their losses and run pretty quickly. Killing is easy; saving takes a moderate amount of time and effort and a level of human interest and altruism that I don't expect Zynga to have. It must be impossible to try to convince the suits that letting people have the thing your company made for free is a good idea.
Can anyone explain the "Zynga simply doesn't have the manpower to keep the title running" part? It makes no sense to me. They've got an already-completed game. Sure, maybe they can't add new features or provide support for new operating systems and whatnot, but I fail to see why an already-functioning game needs manpower to keep it running. Why can't they just let it run and, you know, collect all the monies that roll in?
Fishville? Tell me Zynga, can you ramp jet skis of sharks and skin them underwater in Fishville? Can you kill whores in Mafia Wars 2 or can you even do this:
in Farmville? No? Well then, there's your problem...
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