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Zynga CEO to step down

Mon, 01 Jul 2013 21:07:00 +0000

NEW YORK (AP) -- Zynga's CEO, Mark Pincus, is stepping down to be replaced by Don Mattrick, the head of Microsoft's Xbox business, as the troubled online game company looks to revive its business and stalled stock price.

The maker of "FarmVille" and other games said Monday that Pincus, who founded Zynga Inc. and named it after his American bulldog in 2007, will stay on as chairman and chief product officer.

Mattrick, 49, has served as the president of Microsoft's entertainment business, which includes the Xbox, since 2010. He's been with Microsoft for six years.

Mattrick faces a difficult task. Zynga's stock is down sharply since the company's 2011 initial public offering at $10 per share. Its games have waned in popularity and it announced in June that it was cutting 520 jobs, or about 18 percent of its workforce, to save money.

Pincus seems to think his successor is up to the task. In a statement, Pincus praised Mattrick as "one of the top executives in the overall entertainment business."

Zynga’s farms turn to dust

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 14:30:00 +0000

Zynga, the "casual gaming" company most famous for Farmville and Mafia Wars, laid off 520 employees on Monday. That's 18 percent of the staff, and despite brave talk from founder and CEO Marc Pincus, there's no guarantee the bloodletting will stop there. Zynga has been "hemorrhaging" users for months. The company's share price has tumbled drastically ever since its 2011 IPO. Worst of all, when discussing the biggest tech company implosions of the last decade, the name Zynga is now being mentioned in the same breath as MySpace.

In an email sent to staff, Pincus placed the blame for the layoffs on the company's failure to establish a significant beachhead on mobile devices.

The scale that served us so well in building and delivering the leading social gaming service on the Web is now making it hard to successfully lead across mobile and multiplatform, which is where social games are going to be played.

Zynga slashes games and jobs in effort to regroup

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 15:42:00 +0000

Zynga dealt a blow to time wasters and procrastinators when it ended several of its games yesterday as part of a wider retrenchment, TechCrunch reported.

The social gaming company skyrocketed into the collective brainspace with addictive fare like the simulation "FarmVille" and "Words with Friends." But the public markets haven't been kind to the company. Its ongoing restructuring effort involves cutting more than 100 jobs, closing offices and eliminating more than a dozen of its titles.

TechCrunch wrote that, "Investors feared it had become bloated, free virality on Facebook had been curtailed, competitors were proliferating, and the shift of Facebook users to mobile from Zynga’s stronghold on the desktop canvas would break the company."Zynga went public in December 2011 at $10 per share. On Monday morning it was trading at $2.37. It has not traded above $4 since July.

Games shut down this month include "PetVille," "Mafia Wars 2," "FishVille," "Vampire Wars," and "Treasure Isle."

TechCrunch: