Draw Something Loses 5 Million Users a Month After Zynga Purchase

http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2012/05/04/draw-something-loses-5m-users-a-month-after-zynga-purchase/

by jcc80 • 14 years ago

115 67 14 years ago

forbes.com

3piphany890• 14 years ago

zynga. think one million cold people in a dark room without hope for a light

joering23• 14 years ago

can you imagine it to be a penny stock? they are right now where they were in january.

bgilroy26• 14 years ago

I can't help thinking that number would be of use if you were trying to estimate the worldwide cardinality of techno-hipsters.

hedgie• 14 years ago

aleph-null? what the fuck?

YuriNiyazov• 14 years ago

for a finite set, its cardinality is just the number of elements in it.

taligent• 14 years ago

And ? Zynga wasn't buying an app. They were buying a team.

joering23• 14 years ago

Not really. They were buying $120,000 per day of an in-app sales. DS was the only OMGPOP hit; had they not succeed financially with DS, Zynga wouldn't have had bought them.

wilfra• 14 years ago

This was in part a talent acquisition but a huge part of the sales price was definitely for Draw Something. A more appropriate/typical TA price for OMG would have been in the tens of millions.

rudiger• 14 years ago

Part of the acquisition's worth comes from cross-promoting other Zynga apps through Draw Something.

hexis• 14 years ago

I bet they could have bought the team much more cheaply a few months before Draw Something got popular. I wonder why they didn't...

lnanek• 14 years ago

A friend who really loved the game tried to show it to me, but it kept having server problems. I wonder if that was just an isolated case or if it was frequent, in which case it could drive off users.

buro9• 14 years ago

My girl and I stopped playing because of that. It went from playable to unplayable literally within a week or two.

It would lose our moves (returning to "Your move" when you'd submitted something hours before).

It would give strange errors "You're using this on more than once device"... erm, no I'm not.

And once it forgot who I was and showed no active games once I logged in again... effectively losing the games I was involved in from my account perspective, but my girl could still see the game and when she nudged it re-appeared on my phone.

And then there is just the non-responsiveness of the server. The start-up splash used to show for less than a second, but now it takes 5-10 seconds if it works at all.

For such a simple app and game it went from being a pleasant distraction to a chore very quickly. As such, our use has plummeted in turn.

brendangregg• 14 years ago

Anyone have technical insight into the issues? Non-responsiveness sounds like performance scaling issues.

femngi• 14 years ago

One horrendous bug me and my friends came across with infuriating frequency was that the game would randomly change the word with another one of the same length when asking you to guess it. Effectively making it impossible to win unless you went through every possible word in the dictionary.

Needless to say I don't play any more.

rhizome• 14 years ago

You know, I hear these stories about startups these days and all I can think of is the cloud and how there is so little sysadmin skill in the VC ecosystem. Where are the sysadmins working these days, large companies, or are there just more software producers than sysadmins? I know I pivoted from sysadmin to Rails, but did a lot of others, too? Makes me think I should dip my toes back in the water, COBOL style.

terenceponce• 14 years ago

To be fair, people get bored of mobile apps, in general, pretty easily. I remember playing Draw Something constantly for a few weeks then I eventually stopped playing because it got old pretty fast. I don't think Zynga is the reason why this is happening.

jcampbell1• 14 years ago

Nothing in the title or article implies that the Zynga acquisition caused the decline.

laughinghan• 14 years ago

Depends on how strict your definition of "implies" is.

I think the majority of us agree the title strongly suggests so.

k-mcgrady• 14 years ago

The title makes it sounds like the user decline is related to the Zynga acquisition.

officemonkey• 14 years ago

The article did say that Zynga added "Draw Ads" like Pepsi and Doritos, which, if it's done in Zynga's typical ham-handed fashion, could be a big turn-off.

xianshou• 14 years ago

Every smartphone-equipped college student played Robot Unicorn Attack for a month at one point too. It's a pretty well-made game, hilarious, fairly demanding...and absolutely boring after you play it for the 50th time.

At this point, the speed of viral distribution represents both the blessing and the curse of social companies. You can take your exponential growth this month and extrapolate it over the next year, but that doesn't take into account the dozen newcomers that will catch the attention of the fickle 15M next month. When Metcalfe's law works on a scale of weeks instead of years, network effects become more transient and less valuable. Hopefully this helps teach the market that eyeballs alone should not justify an enormous purchase price.

nostromo• 14 years ago

"Halo 3 looses 5 Million Users 1 Month After Release" ... well of course it did, because most games get old pretty quickly.

To understand if Zynga overpaid, you'd need to know if they bought OMGPOP for a single hit title, or if they see them as a creative group with many hits to come, like Blizzard or Valve.

tensor• 14 years ago

Their history does not indicate a repeat performance, so if they bought them for the reason they made a really big gamble.

andrewfelix• 14 years ago

Halo is an incredibly powerful brand in it's own right, with lore and characters that can be exploited in multiple markets. I don't think it's a fair comparison.

jonnathanson• 14 years ago

Replace "Halo 3" in that example with any title (fictitious or real), and the broader point still stands: even big titles mostly have quick burnout rates. The analogy wasn't so much about Halo 3, specifically, vis-a-vis Draw Something. It was about any hit game vis-a-vis Draw Something.

The console and PC gaming business has largely been a franchise business, largely because of single-title burnout. And, in fact, it makes little economic sense to keep gamers playing your same, single title for years on end (unless they're subscribing to it, a la World of Warcraft). Big studios typically desire burnout, so that they can sell you a new title or sequel for $50, or a piece of DLC for $5-10, or what have you. EA doesn't want to sell you one game that you'll play for 12 months straight; EA wants to sell you 12 games that you'll play for a month apiece.

The iOS/Android app market has been different, though, and I think it's important to dissect why. First, a title like Draw Something will remain on the "shelf" on App Stores indefinitely. Nobody's holding physical inventory on limited shelf space that they've got to clear at the end of the month. Second, console gaming burnout is often the product of fairly direct substitution in the marketplace -- i.e., I'm going to stop playing UberSoldiers 25 because a very similar title, L33tSoldiers 14, just came out and has better graphics and features.

In the iOS app market, we don't see such direct substitution effects[1]. Nobody's burning out on Draw Something because Paint Something just came out with hotter features. In this sense, burnout on Draw Something might actually mean something interesting. It can't be accounted for purely by basis of comparison to the console gaming market and its standard-issue burnout rates. This is where I think the Halo analogy (really, the standard-issue gaming business analogy) doesn't quite hold up.

[1]Unless, of course, we do. A strong argument could be made that any casual iOS app titles are substitutes. So Draw Something competes with Angry Birds, the same way that Modern Warfare competes with Battlefield -- even though Angry Birds and Draw Something have fewer superficial similarities.

denniedarko• 14 years ago

What you're failing to consider here is that every user Halo 3 had paid approx. $60 up front to become a user in the first place. The problem with these free-mium games is that the average revenue per user is so much lower.

rapind• 14 years ago

Exactly. There's no loyalty. Users won't hang around unless they've put something in the pot. Zynga knows this though, since it's the whole premise behind their initial success.

underwater• 14 years ago

Zynga has had dozens of hit games. They obviously know about that user adoption follows and must have taken it into consideration.

mcarrano• 14 years ago

I noticed that about a week after Zynga purchased Draw Something, all of my friends stopped playing. I no longer play either.

yason• 14 years ago

What made your friends change?

leviathan• 14 years ago

I also stopped for a while, but then I created a throw-away email address and used email signup instead of facebook. It's not convenient, but it lets you play the game again.

sparknlaunch12• 14 years ago

Seems odd that a company of that size and experience would stand back and allow such a massive drop. 5 million of 15 million in a month. Ouch.

This drop is " active " users. This is not the end of the world but suggests something bad happened.

keithpeter• 14 years ago

"Whatever happens with the game now, they’ve made out like bandits."

Am I the only one who thought 'and jolly good luck to them'?

EvilTerran• 14 years ago

That was my first thought, too; they've got a princely sum out of "the man", by creating a popular product through (no doubt) a lot of hard work, and without (it seems) wilfully screwing anyone over. Good for them!

philfreo• 14 years ago

Soon after the Zynga acquisition I opened the app and it asked me for a new/additional Facebook permission to have access to post on my wall, with no easy way to play my friends anymore if I said no. Could have something to do with it.

andrewmu• 14 years ago

Yes! I really like the game but I nearly stopped playing because of that. It turns out you can accept it, then remove the App's wall posting privilege right away and it will still work. If that hadn't been the case, for me, Zynga would have paid for their aggressive strategy with the loss of a customer.

bostonvaulter2• 14 years ago

Makes me glad I didn't link it to my facebook at all.

ticks• 14 years ago

I agree, but I am not so bothered with that these days... you can set permissions within FB so that anything an app posts will only be seen by yourself.

nimblegorilla• 14 years ago

I am not so motivated to set my permissions. I'll just play different games now.

nicolasd• 14 years ago

I think the reason for this is the principle of the game.. with the time it's boring..

eridius• 14 years ago

I have to wonder how much of this drop can be attributed directly to Zynga buying it (and their subsequent changes to the app). I know I stopped playing the moment Zynga announced the buyout.

teamonkey• 14 years ago

I doubt that Zynga is even on the radar for most of those 5m people.

loverobots• 14 years ago

In other words, their timing was perfect. Doubt Zynga had much to do with their downfall, another new game somewhere is gaining millions of users...

upinsmoke• 14 years ago

Yes the new Angry Birds.

mertd• 14 years ago

Looking at (http://www.appdata.com/leaderboard/app_store_apps?id=3781-to...), I'd say 100 floors, Rope'n Fly, Sponge Bob.

oellegaard• 14 years ago

Zynga completely abused the product. I started getting requests to give them more rights on facebook, which I solved my signing in with my email - then they started to send me push messages about weird things - I've heard they even asked for read/write sms rights on Android devices. I can only see it one way - Zynga might make cool games, but they are hardcore abusing regular people - also non-techinal people unlike us, that does not realize the outcome of granting these priveledges.

RobAtticus2• 14 years ago

The SMS permissions on Android are for an alternative payment system via SMS. It's in the app description on Google Play.

Edit: Looks like they've since removed the permission and text related to it. shrug

leftnode• 14 years ago

I stopped playing it solely because I wholly disagree with Zynga the company and how they operate.

joering23• 14 years ago

i respect people like you alot. company's mission and how they behave before their product.

+1.

nickpinkston• 14 years ago

I find it funny this was being down-voted when I found it. Are we now against the idea of voting with your dollars on what companies you buy from?

torstesu• 14 years ago

Surely Zynga must have negotiated some earnout agreements or contigency payments in order to mitigate the risk?

michaelochurch• 14 years ago

I think the Zynga acquisition had something to do with the peak.

Social network fatigue started a couple of years ago. That doesn't mean people are ready to ditch social networks outright, but it means that the stupidest abuses are going to leave a sour taste in peoples' mouths, and Zynga is so well associated with these behaviors that, even if people like some of their games, no one likes them.

Zynga's asset is that they understand addictive behavior and are probably the world's leading experts in a specific niche, which is the online delivery of addictive (not always high-quality) games through social media, and the monetization thereof. This knowledge is going to be valuable no matter what happens in social media over the next 5 years. Their brand and reputation are decidedly NOT assets. The opposite, actually.

If Zynga's executive team is smart, they're going to stop being a primary publisher and acquirer and start working behind the scenes, like a consultant, using their knowledge without doing brand-damage to the games they work on, because even though 90% of people don't care about a game company's reputation, the people who set trends do, and by 2014 no one will play Zynga games.

patio11• 14 years ago

Zynga didn't buy every other game this year and yet substantially all will have a growth curve shaped like that, with the main question being height at peak. I also think that zynga would lose in the poll "Who makes FarmVille?" to Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Kim kardashian, even of you asked active paying players of it rather than regular people.

jessedhillon• 14 years ago

They have billboards up and down 101 advertising some -Ville game all the time. I think the average person around here will know.

RobAtticus2• 14 years ago

Zynga bought OMGPOP on March 21. 10 days later it hit a peak. I'm not sure you can correlate the fall with Zynga. The unfortunate part of this graph and story is we don't know what user growth looked like prior to April 1, so drawing any conclusions about Zynga's effect on the game is hard to do.

Havoc• 14 years ago

So Zynga got screwed over. fake tear

Shenglong• 14 years ago

Is this surprising? I've drawn an airport 7 times now.

Might seem like a trivial comment, but this is a classic case reflecting inability to service player wants. If they kept their word list updated and used a better algorithm to filter out repeat-words, they probably could have mitigated their user churn rate.

Yes, perhaps a larger word list was part of their monetization strategy - but Zynga should've realized that was a bad idea when it acquired the company. When users pay for something, there needs to be an instant sense of reward, and a noticeable lasting sense of reward. A larger word list doesn't really fall into either of those categories.

antidaily• 14 years ago

I've had "Olympics" at least 7 times.

landr0id• 14 years ago

This, and the number of games I had going on at one time were the main reasons for me uninstalling it. The game was fun, up until I had 30 games going on at once.

MrFoof• 14 years ago

In addition to the limited word list, poor repeat detection and Facebook integration, another thing that probably rubbed some folks the wrong way are the Sponsored Words.

Not everyone wants to draw Doritos, KFC or Coca-Cola.

samstave• 14 years ago

I deleted the game the day I found out Zynga was buying them. I refuse to have anything to do with Zynga. I will never play their games, buy their stock or support them in general.

Kip9000• 14 years ago

Also called 'regression to the mean'

Inphidel• 14 years ago

I am tired of drawing the same things. I bet others are as well.

Judson• 14 years ago

After the acquisition I started getting spam push notifications and promptly deleted the app. Not sure if this was a Zynga move, but it didn't make me want to continue playing the game.

TheBiv• 14 years ago

This is simply because of college finals.

Draw Something Loses 5 Million Users a Month After Zynga Purchase

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