Tricia Zuryee, AllThingsD:
The social games company says that the third quarter is falling behind because its bread-and-butter Ville-style games continue to underperform. Additionally, the company said it is lowering projections for the full year, and that it will have to write down the acquisition costs of OMGPOP by as much as $95 million.
I knew Zynga would ultimately fail. I advised my own father to not buy Zynga stock but he didn’t listen. The problem is because Zynga doesn’t know a fad when it sees one.
FarmVille was quite obviously a fad. Who the hell plays that shit anymore? No one. Then Zynga bought OMGPOP for the Draw Something game. Uh, no one plays that anymore either. Both were fads. They come and they go. Everybody becomes totally consumed with them for a while and they think it’s the greatest thing ever invented and the developers feel so proud and successful, then people get tired of it and the developers struggle to figure out how to bring back people, but it’s almost always too late.
I don’t blame Zynga though, because a lot of companies have this same problem. They think they have a great long-term product, but it’s only temporarily a hit. And it’s hard for them to admit that their products peak and then fall from there.
Zynga’s popularity has come and gone and it’s been gone for a while. And the OMGPOP acquisition was just stupid. A fad acquiring another fad equals two fads.
