OMGPOP Team Tried To Buy Back Its Site, But Zynga Killed It Instead

http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/05/omgameoverpop/

by duck • 13 years ago

79 53 13 years ago

dlgeek• 13 years ago

I've heard they're losing their best talent left, right, and center. Between that and stuff like this, I wonder how much longer Zynga can keep going at this rate?

est• 13 years ago

I never understand the logic behind acquire-and-shutdown process. Like Google's last decade of shopping and killing spree, not long ago Yahoo bought Astrid and shutdown million users. Are there any significant business reasoning I am missing?

samweinberg• 13 years ago

When a company acquires another and then shuts it down, the reasoning usually has something to do with intellectual properties or acqui-hiring the employees.

redthrowaway• 13 years ago

Except in this case, they laid everyone off. Also, Zynga doesn't seem all that interested in acquiring IP. I imagine this was just a fuck up on their part.

chiph• 13 years ago

Or buying the customer base, if they think the customers can be moved to their platform.

angryasian3• 13 years ago

To remove another competitor from the market

DarkStar8514• 13 years ago

That would be considered illegal by US trade laws if it could be proven or was sufficiently argumented. Unfortuantely I don't believe the courts would accept a plea case after the aquisition had gone through. The big mobile carriers get into this sort of fight a lot though.

shiike• 13 years ago

The current Zynga team has another higher priority (revitalize its business in some way.) and rather than spending time to negotiate the buy-back deal, I guess they just chose to shut the service down for time and resource saving. It's a typical nature for a large company who always optimizes their operation for priority.. If you really love your product, the best and only way is not to sell.

joeblau• 13 years ago

Zynga should have sold it back for 300M-400M.

eupharis2• 13 years ago

Or at least something. If I were a shareholder, I'd be irate. Maybe Zynga has some grand master plan for Draw Something and whatnot. But as of now, this looks like executives taking a massive, unnecessary loss in order to cover their own incompetence.

kevingadd2• 13 years ago

"These team members wanted whatever Zynga was willing to sell, even if that didn’t include the more valuable Draw Something assets or user data. Even more employees offered to work on OMGPOP.com for free. However, Zynga said this would all take too much legal work and wouldn’t agree to sell anything."

angryasian3• 13 years ago

Or it could just be you don't want to introduce more competition with already a solid brand and revenue, unless they are willing to pay.

muyuu• 13 years ago

Not if their strategy was to obliterate a potential competitor from the market.

If that was the idea, their execution was flawless.

JoshGlazebrook• 13 years ago

I still think it was a mistake to buy OMGPOP. Draw Something was one of those games that you get addicted to, but it only lasts a week or two. Eventually it becomes saturated in that game market, and unfortunately for Zynga they bought it when it was in the middle of this process.

jackschultz• 13 years ago

I don't think you'll find many people here who disagree with you there. Since these apps by default are stand alone, so they can't leverage large user bases as well as web apps. And people don't really feel loyalty to companies and their games, they just like to play what's fun.

jlgreco2• 13 years ago

The question I have is, if OMGPOP had been left to their own devices, is it likely that they would have been able to churn out more short-term hits?

It seems plausible to me that they would have been, which implies to me that companies that are like OMGPOP are worth more independent than if they are acquihired. The process of acquihiring such companies could very well be self-defeating.

If you try to buy "it", you don't actually get "it".

dubfan• 13 years ago

How can you reliably turn out hits? If you could, the one-hit wonder wouldn't exist. We'd only have hit machines.

RobAtticus• 13 years ago

I'm not sure why you think that. I had known of OMGPOP for a few years prior to Draw Something because some friends and I played their tetris game. To have one hit like Draw Something in those couple of years doesn't suggest to me they would've had much further success.

rhizome• 13 years ago

The question I have is, if OMGPOP had been left to their own devices, is it likely that they would have been able to churn out more short-term hits?

We'll never know, since Zynga effectively kneecapped them.

loceng• 13 years ago

Probably, or raised a large sum of money to then have the runway, because they in part proved they understood something and created value or something people would use.

RyanMcGreal• 13 years ago

"The pop game design firm that gets acquihired is not the pop game design firm."

nrser• 13 years ago

I still think it was a mistake to buy OMGPOP.

tell that to the people that got in on that secondary offering ;)

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-23/zynga-ceo-pincus-to...

gadders3• 13 years ago

True, but maybe they bought it for the userbase, as much as for the games? I'm just speculating but if you have someone spending money on a game or gaming online, is it easier to cross-sell them?

DarkStar8514• 13 years ago

Copyright issues aside, am I the only one seriously thinking about writing an emulator for the server-side component of a few of their games? I mean I'm sad to see them go dark like I'm sure a lot of you are, and it sucks that such a talented team's work is essentially going to waste, but I'm REALLY going to miss OMGPOP.com's rendition of Pool! It was and is my favorite Pool game with Miniclip's coming in as a close second.

I don't want Zynga to sue my ass, but it's almost worth it. Would anyone else be interested in collaborating? Obviously I can't emulate all the games myself.

DarkStar8514• 13 years ago

Should mention I mostly write PHP, but my Scala should be up to scratch for this too. Or C#, perhaps even Java (shudder). I've got some free time so if someone wanted to create the base in Ruby I'd be happy to assist.

workbench2• 13 years ago

Serves them right really, what on earth did they think was going to happen

Bjoern• 13 years ago

Does being bought by Zynga automatically mean that they will close it down for good? I don't think so.

SimHacker2• 13 years ago

I wanted to launch a Shartcasting site, but OMGPOOP.com was taken.

OMGPOP Team Tried To Buy Back Its Site, But Zynga Killed It Instead

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