Zynga had a very rough 2013 with several top executives leaving the studio for various reasons, not to mention the declining popularity in Facebook games like Farmville (which facilitated the closure of several other titles). As a result of its troubles, the developer revealed a $63 million net loss for its Q2 2014 financial results. It also revealed that its net loss for the third quarter is projected to fall somewhere between $52 and $57 million.

It’s not all bad news as Zynga revealed that it would entering the sports genre, having signed a multi-year licensing deal with NFL and NFL Players Inc. This will see real-life NFL teams and athletes appearing in its future titles as indicated with the recently released NFL Showdown, a management sim. Zynga has also signed a multi-year, multi-year platform deal with Tiger Woods for “breakthrough mobile games that bring the world of Tiger Woods golf to life.”

Will these help the studio turn things around? We’ll find out in the coming months.

Jonathan Blow, the creator of indie platforming sensation Braid, as well as the upcoming PlayStation 4 exclusive The Witness, said in a conference discussing neoroethics that he thinks the Facebook game Farmville, poster child for free to play gaming and microtransactions and all that is wrong with them, is ‘malicious.’

“If you look at a game like Farmville, there’s actually no game there. It’s just reward structure layered on reward structure layered on reward structure with a hollow center,” Blow said.

He didn’t stop there either. “All they’re trying to do is get you to either give them money or pull friends into the game in order to potentially, eventually give them money,” Blow said.

Microtransactions are fast becoming a problem with modern games, with full priced $60 retail games like Forza Motorsport 5 relying on them to the point where game design is hurt; major mobile titles, like Plants vs Zombies 2 and Real Racing 3 (incidentally, both published by EA), have also drawn a lot of ire for this sort of regressive game design.

But when it comes to games, it seems the man is still obsessed with Farmville. During a Garage Geeks event in Tel Aviv, as reported by The Wall Street Journal, a prominent Israeli venture capitalist Yossi Vardi asked Pincus what his favourite game was, to which the latter stated, “Right now, I’m pretty bored with all games.” Despite other games being named, including a few games from Zynga, Pincus’s answer remained the same.

Pincus remarked that he was waiting for a game to capture him like Farmville did. “I want that addiction again,” he stated simply.

The question now is: Does any one want that addiction again? It remains to be seen, as Zynga’s run continues.

Zynga, the name behind popular social games such as Farmville and Mafia Wars, has shows a significant drop in their most recent quarterly earnings. The social gaming company has released a plethora of titles across social media and mobile platforms, Facebook, Android and Apple among them.

For their second quarter earnings, Zynga reported revenue of $213 million, which is a 31% drop from last year’s Q2 revenue of $332 million. In addition to the decline in revenue, Zynga has also suffered in their user base, with monthly unique and monthly active users dropping by 36% and 29% respectively.

In the face of these waning numbers, recently appointed Zynga CEO, Don Mattrick had this to say:

“The next few years will be a time of phenomenal growth in our space and Zynga has incredible assets to take advantage of the market opportunity. To do that, we need to get back to basics and take a longer-term view on our products and business, develop more efficient processes and tighten up execution all across the company. We have a lot of hard work in front of us and as we reset, we expect to see more volatility in our business than we would like over the next two to four quarters. I’m privileged to lead Zynga and I look forward to spending more time with our players, employees and shareholders.”

Mattricks optimism is promising, but it is not without cost. In an effort to cut down on in-house costs, Zynga has implemented a restructuring of the company that will reportedly result in the elimination of 520 jobs.

Source: Polygon

“I’m really proud to partner with a product focused founder like Mark and work with the executive team to grow the DNA of the company and lead this transition.” He also believes that Zynga has “redefined entertainment and brought gaming to the mainstream.”

“Only Zynga combines engineering, industry-leading product management and analytics to deliver products that strike a chord with consumers and add real value in their lives. More than 1 billion people have installed a Zynga game across web and mobile and popular franchises like FarmVille and Words With Friends are a daily habit for millions of people. It’s a staggering milestone that speaks to the mass market opportunity ahead of all of us.

“I’ve seen firsthand how powerful franchises and networks can work together to deliver breakthrough value for consumers and drive sustainable growth. We too, have all the makings of a successful service and business and we have the opportunity to create lifelong relationships with our customers through our high quality products.”

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.

Zynga’s profits have fallen by 95%, which probably means the bubble will burst soon. Zynga has published Farmville and Mafia Wars on Facebook and the profits from this year declined from $27 million to $1.5 million.

Which is bad news, right? But their revenues have increased by 15% compared to 24% last year. Zynga is expanding and that could be a reason for such low profits this year. Zynga blamed the lack of profit on competition and lack of new releases.

Zynga will make a public offering shortly and is asking for $1 billion.

Thanks, Desructoid.

According to information collected by AppData, the FarmVille player base passed the 80 million mark yesterday. And to be more specific and give you they exactly numbers of players playing farmville (yesterday), here you are: 80,920,421

I remember how miniclip.com games were popular 3-4 years back, in one of the companies I worked, and I could see most of my colleagues hooked on to these games for hours, trying to climb up the leader board scores of these games online. Now what we see is the emergence of Social Gaming which is developing through social networking sites and it is a very interesting point to observe.

Social Networking sites became popular some 2-3 years back and you would find any Social Networking fan with multiple internet ID’s, however the euphoria of connecting with friends soon started fading away as you would not always keep poking all the buddies or engage in discussions with everyone in your friend list even if you got widgets on your mobile devices that regularly keep you updated about the events that occur on your Social Networking profiles. Zynga is the company behind Farmville and Cafe World and Farmville currently has around 60 million monthly users. A new Café World game for Facebook already boasted ten million players within a week of its launch last month.

Games like Café World, Farmville or Mafia-Wars are no where close to the cutting edge of the current generation  games which consoles like Xbox 360 and PS3 boast of, they are infectiously fun. They encourage and reward playing with others, which increases the likelihood players will want to buy stuff to impress or help beat their pals. Apart from Zynga, even Playdom and Playfish are key players on social gaming front, so for a console gaming fan like me, it really makes me wonder of all the effort that goes in creating a visually stunning game like Uncharted 2 for PS3, upcoming project Natal in development and even to the extent of the records set by sales of Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, they are never going to the get the number of audience which these simple, no-frills web based, social networking promoted games are currently enjoying. As if you didn’t need furthere reinforcing of this point, the firms who developed these games are set to reap over $300 million in virtual goods revenue this year.

So in a country like India where still majority people access internet from offices, such games are going to find a wider acceptance and fan following compared to the expectations of companies for console gaming development. Online PC gaming is still stuck due to poor penetration of Broadband across India apart from metro cities. Even the social set up in India is such that using a PC for gaming is still not considered that important and with 3G services ready for launch in India, it would propel further rise of mobile gaming development in India, so the picture seems to be clear. The market of console gaming could shrink to just 20% with Social Gaming on the web and games designed to be played on slower PCs and smartphones could occupy 80% of the other chunk.

A noteable point here is that these social platform based games are banking heavily on sale of virtual goods from these games. The worldwide market for virtual goods is expected to approach $5 billion this year; it’s not that Virtual goods are something new to gaming industry, many MMORPG genre games have being offering virtual goods to you or me by earning a magic potion, a sword or a axe in return to hours of fighting, crossing levels, negotiating with fellow gamers or by trading points.

You can call it a shift of buying these virtual goods that has moved on from the barter era of trading points and accumulating points to buy these digital trinklets in hard cash now, for the impatient gen-x which is now helping game companies to develop a robust model of a online marketplace of buying virtual goods. I find it absurd, at the end of day it’s just digital numbers 0 and 1 coded in front of your eyes, you could play around with a virtual pet, buy a 9mm Pistol on Mafia-Wars for $10 rather than waiting to accumulate 42 points to posses one. This model works the best becuase you don’t pay anything to start playing, even Xbox 360 avatars can be dressed to popular outfits from games, and the pricing to me is ridiculous for this stuff, but again there are people out there who are actuall interested in buying this stuff.

So could this trend mark a major shift in gaming industry? The way Apple changed the rules of the game in music industry and got people paying and buying legal music from iTunes for their iPod’s, the same way free-to-play and micropayment revenue from in-game virtual goods is the in-thing for the gaming industry.

So while you are busy finding cows on your farm, companies are alreay milking bucks out of you.