So they’re dropping 314 employees, but at the same time, they made a $527 million purchase for a company that will let them do smoother, more reactive motion and animation.
The idea is that they can differentiate their mobile games by having better animation. But to me, this seems like a very foolish move …
OMG they have Euphoria now, that thing is godly epic, they should go in to Desktop/Console development, it would be a shame to only use those tools for mobile. (yes, i see mobile as “lesser” platform)
They bought natural motion?
Why exactly do they need a ragdoll system? It hasn’t really been used for anything but ragdolls. It can “kind of” do walking but not very well, which is why the only actual thing it did other than ragdolls to my knowledge was in GTAs drunk state.
You have to have a professional team that knows the euphoria inside and out to “train” the software to get anything out of it…I just can’t see how this will be useful for mobile games by a company that does cow clickers.
Maybe it’s changed in the last couple years? Every material I’ve seen from them has been exaggerated claims and let downs.
Yeah, the tech is indeed pretty cool. But mobile games are made to be played while sitting on your toilet, so it seems a like a gross misapplication of the tech.
Natural Motion also has CSR Racing and Clumsy Ninja, which are both quite successful. Euphoria may be a smaller part of the reason.
I think they did get some games along with the deal. But damn, $500 million is A LOT of dinero. They removed 300 people. Let’s say each made $100k per year. That’s $30 million per year. With $500 million, zynga could afford to keep those people on for another 15 years.
You can make a lot of games with 300 people over 15 years …
Zynga just fired their old CEO and replaced him with Don Mattrick of Xbox One fame, to try and make the company look relevant and hi-tech. This is probably his idea. I would guess they’re trying to turn Zynga into the EA of mobile/Facebook games by buying up lots of smaller companies. I wouldn’t be surprised if Zynga basically lays off almost all of its current devs and instead just uses its dump trucks full of cash to become a sort of shell-publisher for owned dev teams, just like EA.
Not if those 300 people are middle management.
lol!
I’m curious whether that will work for zynga or not. It really all comes down to franchises. EA basically exists because of them. But (so far) these smaller games are harder to make franchises from.
Doesn’t work that way, there’s a lot more to it, like overhead and taxes.
Sure. Realistically, there are other costs to factor in. But still, the numbers are in the right ballpark.
Let’s say there’s a 50% overhead. Then my numbers change to 300 people over 10 years. That’s still a lot of games that can be made.
Are they?
How much does it cost to hire X people… where each person is currently making a loss (e.g. say 30k/year) vs how much does it cost to buy a company Y when it’s making money each year?