Sign in / up

back to article Zynga shares wobble as biz bleeds $85.4m in Q1

Freshly public online gaming outfit Zynga reported a first quarter net loss of $85.4m to Wall Street yesterday. The company, which has catapulted its sales off the back of Facebook, where it derives around 93 per cent of its revenue from the social network, had earnings of $17m in the same period a year earlier. Revenue …

COMMENTS

House rules Send corrections
This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    They kept changing the rules

    I was a great fan of Farmville at one point, loving the game and playing it. I paid for a little bit of a boost now and then, but most things were achievable through a bit of work. However, they kept changing the rules. More and more of the nice items started being achievable by pay only, and then some of the basic achievements were only possible by parting with cash. It was like playing darts when the dartboard was on the back of a lama which was walking away from you.

    Net result ... I switched off to their games and stopped playing them completely. End of revenue stream from me.

    2 0
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: They kept changing the rules

      Scale is evil.

      Scale makes it worthwhile to reduce quality, "just a little bit" when it yields big savings for the company. So they do it and do it again and again. They kill themselves with a thousand cuts.

      I killed off my f2p account because the game was designed just to make me log in every day. It wasn't fun. The company confused my participation with my happiness and while it wasn't onerous for the first short while, it quickly become obvious that they were just trying to up my involvement so I would feel committed to them. Bzzt. I'm happy to pay for amusement, but once you start trying to manipulate me, you become a stench in my nostrils.

      0 0
      1. Tom 13
        Reply Icon

        Re: Scale is evil.

        I stopped playing for pretty much the same reason. And it wasn't just once a day - they had tasks that required you to check things every 4 hours. Too much work. I want my play to be play.

        0 0
  2. DrXym

    Shedding tiny tears

    Zynga has a well established track record for doing evil so I'll have no sympathy at all if the bottom falls out of their business.

    9 0
  3. MrT
    Mushroom

    Faster pussycat...

    ... kill! kill!

    Don't not let the virtual barn door smack you in the face on the way out.

    2 0
  4. Tankboy
    FAIL

    Used to be fun...

    But it seems as though all the Zynga games are more like work than play. One thing that really put me off was I bought my wife $20 gift card, thinking that she could use it on multiple games. Wrong. Good luck Zynga. Maybe if your games didn't require constant feeding with our hard earned cash, and having to add total strangers as friends to get new things, you'd might be doing slightly better.

    1 0
  5. Duncan Idaho
    Thumb Up

    farewell

    Not really going to miss you if you go under.

    1 0
  6. Shanghai Tom
    Big Brother

    Facebook has so much sh*te about who wants a pig, built a barn, I have blocked ALL games notifications.

    I don't care what you are playing, that's your problem and your business, and you will piss me off by sending requests for dung to put on your flowers or whatever.

    Cutting zynga from facebook will put it back where it should be, a social COMMUNICATION site, oh damn, I just remembered that FB identifies me in other peoples pictures, sends my phone number to third parties, and has the most complex reasons for leaking your private data to the whole world and simply gets away with it.

    Anyone tried email or a blog ( not tw*tter ) for communicating ? - as long as it's not a hotmail derivative it's useful and usually secure. [ you can get paid $10 for every hotmail account u crack into ]

    1 0
  7. David Gosnell

    My heart bleeds

    Combination of people slowly wising up to the invasion of privacy that Zynga in particular insist upon, and the sale of this tainted data becoming increasingly worthless. Oh, and people realising the folly of putting real money into flaky apps that bork out every five minutes due to the even more flakiness of the Facebook platform they're based on.

    0 0
  8. Alan Brown Silver badge
    Devil

    Couldn't happen to a nicer company

    It wasn't so long ago that the CEO was quoted in el reg boasting about how they breached just about every aspect of user privacy.

    Good riddance.

    1 0
This topic is closed for new posts.

Other stories you might like