Wow, that’s a lot of jobs.
A significant event but not shocking. This is to be expected but I believe its a temporary glitch.
A Temple Run clone or two and they will bounce back. A clone here, A clone there Zynga knows its game
Zynga sucks.
I don’t see how any of their games pull so many players.
They’ve been laying off for awhile now. Since October at least.
I feel bad for the people who now have to look for jobs out there. Sucks.
I admire Zynga Management’s hunger for success.
They do tend to clone games but lots of other game companies do it as well, its a matter of who does it more.
What I do dislike about Zynga’s games is their tendency to monetize the gameplay too much. I am all for in-app purchases but I honestly think they go over the top. This is subjective but somehow I feel if Zynga were a road construction company and they made a 10 mile road, they would have a toll booth every 100 feet
Sure, but there’s clones (Quake Arena vs. Unreal Tournament) and there’s clones (The Sims vs. Zynga’s direct copy of The Sims).
This is really bad news and as was stated they’ve been closing down studio’s and letting people go for quite a while now, though I think this is maybe the biggest single announcement of job losses to date.
I get the feeling that in their desire to expanded quickly they’ve been buying up studio’s left, right and center. Studio’s that were quite happily plodding along, or even flying high, but but in both cases perfectly capable of maintaining employment for their developers. However once acquired by Zynga and the dire straits that Zynga is now in, theses studio’s are no longer viable, meaning all that Zynga has done is buy up studio’s and cost people jobs. Which in my mind is a worse practise than cloning and Zynga was pretty notorious for cloning anyway.
Your feeling is right on the money more often than you might think. I worked for a small software company that was profitable that was purchased by a larger company. The first thing the big company did was assign a bunch of people to our cost center (project managers, legal, etc), and hit us with a large monthly charge (our “portion” of building a couple of large buildings for a sister company that we had nothing to do with). Then they noticed we were now unprofitable with twice the headcount and the enormous building fees, and shut us down - even though we were making more money than when they had purchased us.
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RIP ASAP please
Let’s say it gonna kill a little more Freelance field.
With all those companies closing and guys losing their job, just accurate the number of folk looking for some freelance on 3D and dev field
They were a company being run by “clever business people” who see games as nothing more than interchangeable widgets (which is pretty evident in the way they approached producing games…they even cloned themselves over and over ~_~). Is it any wonder they went downhill?
Haven’t you said before that a successful games company is just good business? In that context I’d think that “clever business people” would be exactly what you wanted.
Nope, I don’t believe the ends justifies the means.
Also I believe that quality and “good” business practices actually end up being economically wiser options (and more secure).
You can sell a person snake oil and run away with their 5 dollars. You can do that for a while. But eventually people will catch on and stop coming to your business. Shady business practices may be “easy money” in the short term , but long term they aren’t sustainable. It is strip mining ideas and talent (and reputation) which could be used to create solid long term business (kind of how game companies in general will burn their talent out, with an average life expectancy of 5 years in the industry… strip mining talent for short term profits).
Basically the race for “more more more” and focus on the short term profits leaves a line of burnt people in its wake (for example, about 600 people in this instance). The people at the very top may be happy (since they get faster and larger payouts…and after they burn one business, they just start a new one), but everyone else suffers (which is kind of why we have the climate we do in a LARGE number of industries… from manufacturing to outsourcing visual effects).
So by “clever business” you actually meant “con artistry”? I guess that’s why you had it in quotes. I assumed that you were just referring to the treatment of games as widgets, which at the strategic level of business I don’t really see a problem with (though it’s another thing at any sort of creative level). That in and of itself isn’t snake oil sales.
In this case I don’t think the people at the top are likely to be too happy, by the way. You seem to be assuming that they get “faster and larger payouts” but you’re missing the fact that they just laid off hundreds of staff. If the payouts were coming “faster and larger” they wouldn’t need to be sacking people, would they?
I’m personally no fan of Zynga, but this still sucks for all involved.
It’s like pop music, mostly crap but the masses want it.
Not exactly con artistry, but IMO close. When I say “clever business”, I mean all the little tricks companies use to take advantage of people.
For example, in marketing you learn that rebates are often not sent in (for different industries and amounts, there is a lot of research and statistics to how many people actually send back, typically very low percentage). It is upfront, they aren’t being “sneaky” in that they are lying or anything else…instead, they are simply taking advantage of human behaviour to gain bigger profits.
The same with game design revolving around skinner box designs or other careful monitization strategies to maximize effectiveness. At what point do micro-transactions or game design built around them move from a “fair use” to “taking advantage of people”. Putting in tons of easily purchased micro-transactions into a free childs game? Has that crossed the line? (because there are plenty who do that, and bet that the children will purchase a ton of them on their parents tablets…and they do).
There is a very fuzzy line between “good business” and “manipulative business” (though, for many, this line doesn’t exist… they see only “if it makes money, it is good business”).
Isn’t manipulative business in favour of the business, good business? its doing everything a business sets out to do. Zynga have it right in ways, the only people who seem to hate Zynga are other developers, the public doesn’t care who made what aslong as they have it. think about it from a general user perspective, they’re a good company in supplying what people want, just like EA with The Sims, people dont give a damn that expansions cost $50, they want them still and they’re happy about it.
“if it makes money, it is good business” - Thats good business in my books.
First - I hope all those displaced by the layoffs find better employment opportunities soon. Best of luck!
As far as Zynga is concerned, they’re doing what EA has done historically - acquiring companies to expand their portfolio, which there’s nothing inherently wrong with. The problem is, as others have mentioned, their dominant ecosystem is FaceBook - outside of it, they really don’t have a lot of steam. So, by buying up the creators of DrawStuff, they were setting up that studio for failure. I see the problem as Zynga executives not really understanding their strengths, or weaknesses fully. I perceive them as making blind stabs in an attempt to break out of FaceBook before that bubble collapses - a just strategy - instead of focusing on what makes their clo…erm, games profitable already.
That brings to mind something from company ethics training at my previous job: “Companies do not have ethics. Agencies do not have ethics. People have ethics, and must excersize them as situations demand.” People must make good decisions to stop the scenarios you described from becoming reality.
I agree, but nothing that you described is what I’d call “manipulative”, except maybe the thing with kids. There’s no point going into business if you’re not going to attempt to maximise monetisation, and designing products that maximise sales is… the whole point?
I agree that designing for accidental sale via children and similar stuff is a tad on the dodgy side. But if I knew that putting my game in one particular box over another would increase sales by x%, and the design wasn’t offensive, then I’d absolutely do it. And lets push that logic out further - should we mandate that everyone has to sell their products in beige boxes with the name written on them in black text? Entirely abolish all sales and marketing roles, because they exist solely to be “manipulative”?
What I do think is manipulative is stuff like “interest free” periods and financing and other things designed not so much to influence a purchase decision but to convince people that they can afford things when they actually can’t. Or lies like telling you that a store has the cheapest price when it doesn’t, backed up by a “we’ll price match if you find it cheaper” (unlike a rebate I consider this manipulative because it’s not being up-front about it, it’s using misinformation to influence someone towards an inferior decision backed up by the knowledge that, just like the rebate, few will bother to fix it).
Have a buddy who worked there. Left before this. Never has a whole lot of good to say about the place, lol.