At one time, Facebook and Zynga were more or less synonymous. You went to the big F for your social gaming fix. That’s the way it was. But Zynga gained much success from it’s Farmville and Mafia Wars games (amongst others), thus breaking away from Facebook.
Recently though, it’s share prices have dropped a whopping 40 percent.
Chief operating officer and ex-EA executive John Schappert commented on the same, blaming it’s misfortune on Facebook for changes made in the last quarter.
Facebook made a number of changes in the quarter. These changes favoured new games. Our users did not remain as engaged and did not come back as often.
In that same quarter, Zynga experienced a loss of $22.9 million USD. Considering they scored a profit of $1.4 million USD in the same quarter last year, that’s bad.
Some blame virtual goods shopping, some blame the boom simply evaporating. Whatever the case, Zynga’s in trouble.