Every week the Opus team picks a news story or topic or idea that is relevant to the entrepreneurs and businesses we partner with.

RSS Feed

Archives

Fewer ‘Ville’s

Ajit Deshpande - - 0 Comments

Last week, leading social game developer Zynga announced that over the month of December it had followed through with its planned closure of 11 game titles, including Petville, Forestville, Fishville and Mafia Wars 2. As part of the announcement, Zynga also mentioned it was shifting its focus towards mobile games, and was also applying to run real-money gambling games in the state of Nevada.

Zynga’s rise as a pioneer in social strategy gaming is well-chronicled. Indeed, Zynga still dwarfs all other app developers on the Facebook platform in terms of MAU, with Farmville 2 currently being the most popular Facebook game. However, the next four most popular games in order are Texas HoldEm Poker (from Zynga), Candy Crush Saga (from King.com), Bubble Safari Ocean (from Zynga) and Diamond Dash (from Wooga), all of which are skill-based card/arcade games rather than strategy games. According to Flurry, social strategy games have a retention rate after 90 days of ~30%, and it does seem now that interest is waning on the whole for this game category. In that context, Zynga’s increased focus on games geared towards mobility (a much more tangible trend, with possibly greater long term monetization potential), and real-money gambling (which leverages human psyche) is an excellent ploy.

Question is, does Zynga have what it takes to become a player in mobile gaming? Zynga’s best mobile game currently is in-house developed Poker, ranked just outside the top 10 for iPhones, whereas two of its high profile acquisitions, Words with Friends and Draw Something languish outside the top 50. Clearly the company hasn’t picked its winners well. Mobile platforms offer a lot for gamers – anytime, anywhere access and possibilities for cross-platform, turn-based and multi-screen settings – and companies like Rovio, Ngmoco and King.com have successfully used these options to varying degrees in creating top grossing games. In fact, King.com is showing that it is possible to do well on both Facebook and in mobile. Does Zynga have it in its DNA to do the same? If not, then they might need to buy their way into mobility, and given their track record that’s not the best proposition for them.

As for now, it’s so long Petville…

« Back to Blog
Also on the Opus Blog

The Datastore API from Dropbox

July 15, 2013
Ajit Deshpande - Speaking of Dropbox, the company had its first developer conference last week, where the company announced its Dropbox Platform, consisting of a Sync API, a number of ‘Drop-ins...

Outlook.com is off to the races!

August 5, 2012
Ajit Deshpande - On July 31st, Microsoft unveiled its new cloud-based email service, Outlook.com, complete with a simple and clean UI and featuring integration with its own SkyDrive as well as with...

Pinterest on the rise!

September 10, 2012
Ajit Deshpande - Last week, Pinterest hit an interesting albeit purely notional milestone – that of becoming a larger source of traffic for publishers than Yahoo – in its journey towards...

Flickr Turns 10!

February 21, 2014
Ajit Deshpande - Photo-sharing site Flickr last week celebrated its 10th anniversary. Acquired by Yahoo in 2005 for 35 million, Flickr currently has 92 million users across 63 countries that...