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Zynga layoffs in Boston, Chicago, Austin

L

Lombax

Banned
Oxymoron said:
Anyone who went to work at Zynga in the sincere belief that they had a sustainable business model is an absolute sucker.
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What is crazy to me is this shit is so cyclical, we when through this same thing in the early 2000's. Overvalued .coms, and companies throwing money around with almost 0 logic behind it.

Good luck to those who were laid off today. If you are in the Boston area feel free to PM me if there is anything I can do to help.
 
G

Gustav

Banned
Same thing happened at BigPoint today. 100+ employees laid off worldwide. Many teams killed off.
BigPoint is one of the oldest and biggest F2P pubs/devs in Europe.
 
K

Kifimbo

Member
Team,

Earlier today we initiated a number of changes to streamline our operations, focus our resources on our most strategic opportunities, and invest in our future. We waited to share this news with all of you until we had first spoken with the groups impacted.

As part of these changes, we’ve had to make some tough decisions around products, teams and people. I want to fill you in on what's happened and address any concerns you may have.

Here are the most important details.

We are sunsetting 13 older games and we’re also significantly reducing our investment in The Ville.

We are closing the Zynga Boston studio and proposing closures of the Zynga Japan and UK studios. Additionally, we are reducing staffing levels in our Austin studio. All of these represent terrific entrepreneurial teams, which make this decision so difficult. In addition to these studios, we are also making a small number of partner team reductions.

In all, we will unfortunately be parting ways with approximately 5% of our full time workforce. We don’t take these decisions lightly as we recognize the impact to our colleagues and friends who have been on this journey with us. We appreciate their amazing contributions and will miss them.

This is the most painful part of an overall cost reduction plan that also includes significant cuts in spending on data hosting, advertising and outside services, primarily contractors.

These reductions, along with our ongoing efforts to implement more stringent budget and resource allocation around new games and partner projects, will improve our profitability and allow us to reinvest in great games and our Zynga network on web and mobile. Zynga made social gaming and play a worldwide phenomenon, and we remain the industry leader. Our success has come from our dedication to a simple and powerful proposition – that play is not just something people do to pass time, it’s a core need for every person and culture.

We will all be discussing these difficult changes more with our teams and as a company. Tomorrow, Dave and I will be hosting a post-earnings webcast (details to follow) and next week we will be discussing our broader vision and strategy during our quarterly all-hands meeting. I’m confident this puts us on the right path to deliver on the promise of social gaming and make Zynga into an internet treasure.

If you have any immediate questions, I hope you will talk directly with your manager, Colleen, or me.

I look forward to talking with you tomorrow.

Mark
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http://ca.ign.com/articles/2012/10/23/major-layoffs-at-zynga-rumored
 
Jackben

Jackben

bitch I'm taking calls.
Doesn't really seem all that sincere. I hope everyone is able to pick up the pieces. If you still have a job at Zynga I would be vetting contacts and preparing resumes regardless
 
S

SatelliteOfLove

Member
Mesoian said:
It's more about paying bills and getting work where you can.
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And that's because too little money went to "traditional" games these folks once worked at back in the day, and money that goes to freemium/iOS/asocial games goes to freemium/iOS/asocial games not to specific companies for long.
 
D

DGRE

Banned
Anyone who thinks this is a lasting model is seriously kidding themselves. I said it before in another thread, F2P is the pet rock of the gaming industry.
 
H

HK-47

Oh, bitch bitch bitch.
DGRE said:
Anyone who thinks this is a lasting model is seriously kidding themselves. I said it before in another thread, F2P is the pet rock of the gaming industry.
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Really? Cause several huge companies in Asia have been sustained for years on F2P games.
 
L

LyleLanley

Banned
HK-47 said:
Really? Cause several huge companies in Asia have been sustained for years on F2P games.
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I think F2P can work, but Zynga seemed to have been going about it the wrong way. I'm sorry to hear about people losing their jobs but this seemed inevitable.
 
K

Kai Dracon

Writing a dinosaur space opera symphony
One should not confuse actual F2P models that have been proven to work for years with social "pyramid scheme" games just because there's no initial buy-in to begin playing them. They're almost totally different things.
 
M

Mario

Sidhe / PikPok
Unfortunate to hear about the layoffs, but not unexpected given the softening of the Facebook market.

We'd be happy to hire ex-Zynga staff though. If you are out there, get in touch!
 
J

jcm

Member
grimshawish said:
Want to know why Zynga are in trouble? Because they have offices in Boston, Chicago and Austin - and thats only part of the business.



This is UTTERLY INSANE. Who the hell thought this was a good idea?!
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That would be this douchebag right here.

Wpqt8.jpg



TucoBenedictoPacifico said:
Sounds like the opposite to me. They acted that way under the assumption that their stock were going to increase in value after the IPO... Which clearly didn't happen.
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I think his point is that zynga is run by a bunch of fucking assholes who are incapable of taking the long view.
 
G

gurudyne

Member
Kageshinzo said:
Karma's a bitch, ain't it, Zynga?
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If you're talking about the stock being worth nothing, then not really. The people who made this clusterfuck possible have golden parachutes made from the conveniently timely offloaded stock. The karma might kick in with the pending insider trading investigations though. Personally, I think Pincus & Crew are boned--I have no doubt they're guilty of it, they're lazy enough to have done less than a half-assed job of covering their tracks and scummy enough to sell each other out for reduced time/lesser fines. Should be fun to watch.

Shame about the employees, but the CEO of this company is a well-known weasel who's done really questionable, ethically bankrupt things for money. I mean, he's about the closest human equivalent to Flintheart Glomgold.
 
A

amatecha

Member
DGRE said:
Anyone who thinks this is a lasting model is seriously kidding themselves. I said it before in another thread, F2P is the pet rock of the gaming industry.
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Well, you might feel that way, but F2P isn't really the issue here. Zynga is making huge income ($1-1.5b / yr). I'd wager it has a lot more to do with how they've just expanded so much (why do they have nearly 20 studios?!) in such a few short years - I'd probably describe their growth as overzealous and/or reckless. Well, plus, their business model has been widely questioned pretty much from the start, and it appears that criticism has proven to be pretty justified...
 
D

DGRE

Banned
Kaijima said:
One should not confuse actual F2P models that have been proven to work for years with social "pyramid scheme" games just because there's no initial buy-in to begin playing them. They're almost totally different things.
Click to expand...
Sorry. Yeah. This is what I was saying. I wish we had different terminology for the two models, because they hardly resemble each other.
 
C

cpp_is_king

Member
I wonder if killing The Ville has anything to do with the lawsuit. Maybe not in and of itself, but combined with the fact that it's apparently making no money and then a lawsuit to boot, I guess it wasn't worth it.

Does this mean EA will drop the suit against them now? Will be interesting to see if they pursue the lawsuit anyway. Would there even be grounds to continue the suit based on past damages?
 
L

Limanima

Member
-Casual player discovers video games
-Casual player gets crazy and spends hours and money playing
-Company grows like crazy
-Casual player gets tired and stops playing
-Company goes bankrupt

Yep, I think that sums it up.
 
Haunted

Haunted

Member
Earlier today we initiated a number of changes to streamline our operations, focus our resources on our most strategic opportunities, and invest in our future.
Click to expand...
Man, that sounds great! I'm excited for Zynga's bright future. :)



wait what
 
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