Only nine months ago, Zynga was worth $11.5 billion, pumping out new games every month at breakneck speed.
It seems so far away in time, given everything that's happened since.
Zynga's stock is stuck in the doldrums and it's shuttering 11 older games like PetVille and Indiana Jones Adventure World that failed to keep large audiences. It's just more bad news in a year full of bad news for Zynga.
2011 was a very good year. Zynga had just gone public. The paint had barely dried on its gleaming, brick-clad Dog House headquarters on the western edge of San Francisco's South of Market district—one of the hottest destinations for talent from within and without the video-game industry.
Since then, investors wiped $10 billion off Zynga's market cap. Executives and creative talent fled, as did players. New games were slow to come out. Acquisitions like OMGPOP soured. Zynga closed some of its offices and laid off employees. And Facebook and Zynga ripped up their special relationship, leaving Zynga as just one of many games makers on the social network's platform.
There were some bright spots. Zynga made progress on getting into real-money gaming—that is, gambling. It swiftly filled holes in its executive lineup with new leaders. It showed signs of a creative renaissance with new games. And it remains far and away the largest player in social games.
But it's left with a sense of wasted time and lost promise, with Wall Street setting a clock on CEO Mark Pincus's time at the top of the company.
January started off with a whiff of optimism about real-money gaming
Rumors spread that Zynga would get into online gambling, a billion-dollar revenue opportunity, though sources within the company batted those down.
It launched Hidden Chronicles, a new, more sophisticated social game, and Scramble With Friends
Hidden Chronicles ended up disappointing. It peaked at 33 million monthly active users and has since dropped to 5 million. Scramble With Friends, an extension of the Words With Friends franchise, has struggled, too, barely staying in the top 50 on Apple's ranking of mobile games.
And Zynga seemed to have the talent momentum, too
Zynga hired away Barry Cottle, a top online-games executive, from Electronic Arts. This hire stuck: After some shakeups, Cottle is now chief revenue officer.
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