Zynga has announced it plans to scrap six games, including Pioneer Trail, (previously known as FrontierVille) by the end of next month. Similar to other Zynga games, Pioneer Trail could not escape from obsolence, and has lost a chunk of monthly active players in recent years.
Old games leaving, new coming
Announcing the shutdown, the Facebook fan page of the game expressed gratitude to the members of the Pioneer Trail community. The statement further read that Zynga does not take shuttering games “lightly but we made the tough decision to shutdown Pioneer Trail so our team of game makers can put their passion, energy and time into developing new games.” CEGamers was the first to report about the upcoming shutdown of Pioneer Trail on April 30th.
Apart from Pioneer Trail, the social game maker has announced that it will soon scrap five more games including Zynga Slots, Duck Dynasty Slots, Riches of Olympus, Ayakashi: Ghost Guild and FarmVillage (a title launched by Zynga China at the end of Q4 2014).
Earlier in March, Zynga announced it was shutting down CityVille, which will also be taken offline on April 30th. Shutting down these games will let Zynga focus on “six to ten” new games it expects to unveil this year, according to a recent earnings call. The upcoming games includes titles such as Dawn of Titans, from its NaturalMotion studio and Empire & Allies, which is a restructured version of the previously closed Facebook game of the same title.
Analysts not confident on Zynga
Separately, in a research note issued to the investors on Monday, Vetr analysts lowered their rating for Zynga from a Buy to a Hold, and assigned it a price target of $2.82.
Several other analysts have also come out with an opinion on Zynga in recent weeks. Zacks analysts have assigned a Neutral rating to the stock from an Outperform, giving it a price target of $2.70 in a research note to investors February 19th. Piper Jaffray assigned the game maker a price target of $2.50, amd putting up a Hold rating, in a research note to investors on February 13th. Benchmark Co. analysts assigned a Hold rating in a note to the investors on February 13, and lowered their price target to $2.36 from $2.45. Zynga currently has a consensus rating of Hold and an average target price of $3.49.
