Zynga’s recent upper management shakeup has certainly grabbed the attention of the technology blogosphere. The troubled game publisher announced that several executives would be leaving the company earlier this week, with a large-scale staff shakeup seeing 13 executives report directly to Zynga’s new CEO.
The new CEO is, of course, former Microsoft executive Don Mattrick. Tasked with a difficult job – returning the troubled game publisher to its former position of total online gaming dominance – Zynga’s new CEO is making big changes, but are the big changes exactly what the company needs?
Zynga’s early success may have been rewritten as innovation and forward-thinking game industry know-how, but the reality is a little different. Aiming to develop a hit game for Facebook, Zynga turned to existing social games, using them as inspiration for its biggest game to date – FarmVille.
Since the success of FarmVille, Zynga’s largely expanded its network of ‘Ville’-style games. CastleVille and CoasterVille have joined its portfolio, as well as ChefVille – a cooking game aimed at social media users. The titles are familiar and the content is certainly eye-catching, but are the games as successful as their predecessors?
For the most part, the answer appears to be a resounding ‘no’. Zynga’s early success, which led to the social game publisher contributing a huge amount of impressions to Facebook’s at-the-time new advertising platform, may have been its greatest error – a level of success that, for the worst, set the standard for all future games.
Given its $10 IPO share price, it seems that Zynga may have fallen victim to one of the technology sector’s biggest errors – a bubble-like valuation that was based not on its long-term success stories and sustainable revenue, but on an early success that distorted its view of what’s possible over the long term.
