Every time I see this kind of story about Zynga, I revive a little on the inside.
Zynga deactivates 500+ employees in major layoff
Online gaming company Zynga is getting rid of 18 per cent of its staff so its remaining employees can have enough resources to stay alive in a mobile device–led world – or so their CEO says. The FarmVille and DrawSomething gambling gaming company announced plans to get rid of over 500 people on Monday in a memo from its …
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Tuesday 4th June 2013 00:46 GMT Don Jefe
We All Know
Any time someone says 'We all know (x) is necessary' it is always the worst kind of bullshit. It is always a big FU to the employees who probably got escorted out by security and a bunch of ManagOSpeak to the press. I just wish they would speak in a straightforward manner and at least act like they cared.
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Tuesday 4th June 2013 02:53 GMT Chairo
Re: We All Know
I just wish they would speak in a straightforward manner and at least act like they cared.
We All Know - they are in their position exactly because they can handle the ManagOSpeak, so this will not happen. "We are sorry that we have to fire you to increase our annual bonus" - Nah, never!
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Tuesday 4th June 2013 14:11 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Just want to say .....
Under normal circumstances I might agree, but Zynga is an edge case - they're one step up from herbal pill pushers and 'debt refinancing' companies. EA, Google, and Microsoft may commit evil in the course of executing their business models, but Zynga's business model and product itself (I won't flatter them by suggesting they have more than one) is and always has been explicitly predatory. And what's more, Pincus has actively bragged about it.
I won't go as far as to condemn everyone who works for him as evil, but I find it hard to muster general sympathy in this context.
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Wednesday 5th June 2013 13:03 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: @David W.
That's why I'm -not- condemning the individual employees outright. But while I understand your point, at some level I think you have some amount of responsibility when you work for rat bastards. Most people working at Zynga aren't facing life on the streets or day labor in a Dickensian sweatshop as an alternative.
And yeah, the guy doing the pixel art isn't as responsible as the one tweaking the 'gameplay' models. It's not simple. But broadly, if you go work there, you know what you're helping to do. And it's not good.
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Tuesday 4th June 2013 11:58 GMT Robert Helpmann??
What does that even mean?
Zynga is sacking its staff – "reducing our cost structure" – to give the remaining employees "the runway they need to take risks and develop these breakthrough new social experiences."
I will take a stab at this: "We are firing that lot pour encourager les autres. Those left can all take a flying leap for all I care; I have a golden parachute."
Such a shame this was not applied to the upper echelon as the Voltaire school of management might indicate.
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Tuesday 4th June 2013 15:51 GMT Anonymous Coward
It really isn't all that surprising...
While they may have decent graphics in their products, the coding mistakes and over-bloating are driving many away. The over-bloating causes a lot of memory to be consumed. I've seen people playing with no problems for a long time and then the games get slower and slower over time as they advance. Then come the flash crashes and the troubles to get the games to even load. In many cases, adding more memory to the machine has allowed them to resume playing...until the game gets even larger and they have to buy more memory.
But besides the bloat and memory consumption, there is, quite simply, the poor coding. When collects items by helping others outside the game in the desired manner and those items never show up inside the game, well something is very wrong. Then you have the items that you collect and build within the games that don't appear, disappear or otherwise stop working. If one hasn't played the games then this may not make any sense but it is what happens.
I just hope that they are keeping the good coders or they are going to be loosing more faster.
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Tuesday 4th June 2013 17:18 GMT Spoonsinger
Sorry but.....
"Zynga, like every other consumer-oriented company, has been adversely affected by the rapid shift to mobile, as business models built for the desktop era have a hard time dealing with the lower ad fees generated from mobile devices."
Errmm, haven't they always been just purveyors of trashy iOS/Android 'games', and had really nothing to do with desktop stuff? Or am I missing a whole other side to their general crappyness?.