Zynga down ~40% in after hours trading(google.com)
google.com
Zynga down ~40% in after hours trading
http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:ZNGA
8 comments
From my experience, they've also made games unplayable. Take "Draw Something" for example. Ever since the Zynga acuisition you get the following
1) Automatic Facebook login checks. I'm fine with this since everyone I played with are on Facebook. The problem here is that sometimes the automatic login does not work leading me to constantly open, close, open, close, open the app just to get the the main screen.
2) The game is buggy as hell. Not only is the login bad, but the game constantly dies. Its not fun anymore. In the back of your mind you know that as soon as you click out of an ad, the application will close out causing you to reopen it to see ... more ads. Its ludicrous.
3) Speaking of ads, there's like 3 times the ads as before. Some ads don't even have a way to click out of it. You're just stuck looking at a 10-30 second ad to draw (if the app didn't close) for 10 seconds. It also seems as if every time you touch a screen, you get an advertisement. Its ridiculous.
It wasn't like this game was that fun to begin with. But turning a game into a chore just makes you not want to play it anymore. And I haven't.
1) Automatic Facebook login checks. I'm fine with this since everyone I played with are on Facebook. The problem here is that sometimes the automatic login does not work leading me to constantly open, close, open, close, open the app just to get the the main screen.
2) The game is buggy as hell. Not only is the login bad, but the game constantly dies. Its not fun anymore. In the back of your mind you know that as soon as you click out of an ad, the application will close out causing you to reopen it to see ... more ads. Its ludicrous.
3) Speaking of ads, there's like 3 times the ads as before. Some ads don't even have a way to click out of it. You're just stuck looking at a 10-30 second ad to draw (if the app didn't close) for 10 seconds. It also seems as if every time you touch a screen, you get an advertisement. Its ridiculous.
It wasn't like this game was that fun to begin with. But turning a game into a chore just makes you not want to play it anymore. And I haven't.
I agree their demographics were interesting, but I think that's more indicative of the "casual games" space in general, not specifically something Zynga uncovered. For example, PopCap Games had a big hit in the early 2000s with Bejeweled, which had a similar demographic profile.
And, while they didn't make any money on their own, there were some '90s games like that as well. In his book on casual games (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262517396/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...), Jesper Juul also notes the interesting existence of very hardcore Freecell and Minesweeper players, who tend to come from nontraditional gamer demographics and don't consider themselves "gamers", despite objectively playing many hours/day and becoming very skilled at their games of choice.
And, while they didn't make any money on their own, there were some '90s games like that as well. In his book on casual games (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262517396/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...), Jesper Juul also notes the interesting existence of very hardcore Freecell and Minesweeper players, who tend to come from nontraditional gamer demographics and don't consider themselves "gamers", despite objectively playing many hours/day and becoming very skilled at their games of choice.
Not a good year for investors in newly public tech companies... of big IPOs in the past year, Zynga is down 70% from the offering price, Facebook is down 30%, and Groupon is down 55%. Seems like the investing public screwed up and massively overpaid VCs/founders for the shares, by a total of about six billion dollars.
I think just as interesting, it was almost entirely predicted by people who are heavily in the tech industry.
The market writ large ignored the input from those in the know and is now acting surprised -- it befuddles the imagination.
The market writ large ignored the input from those in the know and is now acting surprised -- it befuddles the imagination.
Except the VCs and to a lesser extent the Tech media, who are supposed to be in the know, were actively promoting this junk as revolutionary.
Once again, Joe Public and his retirement get the short end of the stick. Manufacturing money is a dirty business. I wonder if we'll ever look at Silicon Valley VCs in the same light as we do Wall Street bankers?
Once again, Joe Public and his retirement get the short end of the stick. Manufacturing money is a dirty business. I wonder if we'll ever look at Silicon Valley VCs in the same light as we do Wall Street bankers?
To be fair, there's a constant din of people predicting doom for almost any company that has success. And for several years, the naysayers have generally been wrong (like, billions of dollars wrong) about FB & Zynga. So, how do we tell the real predictions from the bogus ones?
Is anyone making a lot shorting these companies?
It's really the social bubble and consumer tech IPOs that are getting crushed, and those were always pretty obviously scams.
Guidewire is up over 80% even after the recent pullback, because it has a real business model and steady, recurring income. It'll probably get beaten down more by the lock up expiration over the next month or so, but I'd bet dollars to donuts it doesn't drop anywhere close to its IPO pricing.
Guidewire is up over 80% even after the recent pullback, because it has a real business model and steady, recurring income. It'll probably get beaten down more by the lock up expiration over the next month or so, but I'd bet dollars to donuts it doesn't drop anywhere close to its IPO pricing.
You forgot LinkedIn which is still up 40% over its IPO.
Good point; I had forgotten about them, and they're big enough to change the total returns significantly for institutional investors who were routinely buying into the entire sector (as opposed to those who got unlucky in only picking Facebook).
Why not? I'd say this is an excellent year for bearish investors.
After hours trading statistics shouldn't be taken too seriously, because there are far less traders resulting in less liquidity/larger spreads. For all we know, the -40% quote was triggered by a single trade [perhaps a panicked investor agreed to sell his shares at a 40% discount]. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_hours_trading]. For all we know, it might tank tomorrow, but it hasn't yet.
According to nasdaq.com there were 5.9MM ZNGA shares traded in the after hours session: http://community.nasdaq.com/News/2012-07/after-hours-most-ac...
IMHO, Conclusive proof that we are not in a bubble, just a boom.
Bloomberg: "Zynga Inc. (ZNGA), the biggest developer of games played on Facebook Inc. (FB), missed analysts’ second-quarter revenue and profit estimates as the company struggled to add social game users." http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-25/zynga-misses-estima...
Looks like Facebook is down almost 8% as well.
Facebook derives a large amount of revenue from Zynga, so it's probably not completely unrelated.
As I wrote before, this is a doomed company. They spend cash like they make a lot of it, but in reality lose hundreds of millions. Mark my words, whatever day-to-day fluctuations occur over the next 6 months to a year, Zynga will be swallowed up by AOL or Yahoo and disappear. Horrible management, talented employees, flawed business model.
TechCrunch articles are cool, but facts are stubborn things. If you spend more than you make, eventually that shit will catch up with you.
TechCrunch articles are cool, but facts are stubborn things. If you spend more than you make, eventually that shit will catch up with you.
i think this is an amazing buy. what do you guys think?
http://i.imgur.com/kiXss.png looks like a downtrend
Just curious, where did you get that graph from?
Tradestation software. http://www.tradestation.com/
I think Poe's Law.
I realize this isn't actually the end of them, but it's indicative of where they're going.
I think in the end, the narrative for zynga will be roughly this: they found a way to capitalize on markets that really weren't being served at all (last I heard, the average zynga customer was roughly a 43 year old woman -- not your average target market for games). And then they killed their own golden goose.
They offered an experience that was safe, accessible, and novel to people that had never gotten to experience games on those terms, and the market exploded.
The problem is, what they offered wasn't sustainable. Instead of parlaying their initial shallow success into advancing the art form, they tried to optimize it in a way that wasn't really ethical. Their games were designed to be exploitive in the same sense that gambling is exploitive (using the same cognitive mechanisms.) They expected that people would just keep coming back for the same reasons people become compulsive gamblers -- because they can't help it. But buying more trinkets in a game that makes you check up on it every four hours isn't the same experience as being a VIP at a casino and even for the most compulsive people I think the nature of a zynga game becomes pretty gross after a while.
So I guess I'd say they made bad games for ethically dubious reasons, and nobody in their right mind should miss them when they're inevitably gone.