In spite of the well-wishes from David Sable, Global CEO of Y&R, in a blog post on the Huffington Post’s Media site earlier today, Zynga Inc (NASDAQ:ZNGA) faces an uphill battle as it tries its best to move towards the mobile and tablet market in order to save both its stock price and recent failings in social media.
The post asks a number of questions for Zynga Inc (NASDAQ:ZNGA) as it disentangles itself from Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB), the platform where it enjoyed early successes for a number of its games including Farmville where it enjoyed 10 million active players within six weeks of its release. Additionally, Sable spoke of Zynga’s recent success in physical board games based on Zynga Inc (NASDAQ:ZNGA)’s best “sellers.” A bit of a misnomer given the perceived death of the home board game that forced Monopoly into a desperate attempt to ramp up sales by killing the iconic iron game piece.
I always liked the iron. But rather than focusing on Mr. Sable’s well-wishes and vague suggestions for improved Zynga Inc (NASDAQ:ZNGA) stock performance I found David Ko’s, Zynga’s Chief Operations Officer and Number Two, words in an interview with Venture Beat yesterday to be a little more telling of the company’s future. Or rather, their potential road map to a brighter future.
In an enlightening interview, Ko made it clear that mobile is the way forward while making it clear that more and more of Zynga’s 3000 employees will be shifted towards this belief.
A few excerpts from the interview:
About 297 million people come to us every month on our overall network, and of that, about 72 million are mobile. While the numbers may appear larger to some, what we’ve said is that it’s still very early for us in mobile. We’ve been proud of how quickly the team has been focusing on the shift to mobile. The shift has come because of our players. So many of our players are telling us — we’re seeing it in their usage patterns and their play habits — that they want to play more on mobile and across tablets.
Additionally….
While people may focus on mobile today, what it’s really about is, we deliver content. We’re creating fun social experiences for our players. That shift, when we first started a couple of years ago, was on the PC. Today we’re seeing more of that shift on mobile.
When asked about Kakoa the Korean messenger service that is creating a sensation…..
Some of those games that they’re launching, as you just mentioned, are in the top 10 grossing on Android, and that hit people by surprise. What you find, though, is that it really shouldn’t have surprised us. When people are on that network, they’re looking for other things to potentially go and do. A natural median, if you’re being social with friends, is to say, “Hey, is there a quick game I could go try,” and potentially send virals and invites back and forth. That’s what you see in Kakao.
On DrawSomething2 and Ryan Seacrest…….
I’m excited. We’re very focused on our franchise model. That’s creating hit games. There are three that I can specifically talk about now. One you may have seen tweeted out by Ryan Seacrest earlier in the week. He talked about Draw Something 2 coming, which I’m personally excited about. When Draw Something came out last year, it was one of the biggest games to hit mobile. It’s had more than 100 million downloads to date. I think we’ve had 10 billion drawings or more. It’s been number one in 84 countries, I think.
The rest of the article is worth a look and available here.
