<p><pre><code> | "but most of my team had new jobs lined up
| by the time they left the building anyway."
</code></pre>
I've never experienced this. Does this mean that they were already looking, or that they were able to immediately call someone up and get a job offer on-demand?<p>Edit: To be clear, having 'a job lined up' to me means that they already at least have an offer, rather than just a bunch of emails from recruiters and/or people looking to hire them. It seems really amazing to go from laid off to "have a job offer" in an afternoon. I could definitely see laid-off-to-interviews-lined-up in an afternoon though. Am I being too specific in my reading of this?
I was surprised to hear 3000 people were making those Zynga games. Doing what exactly? Pls I'm genuinely curious.<p>These social games seems so lame to me that I can't think of any reason why someone will even think of building a public company on top of it. You simply cannot meet investors' quarterly demand when your success is built on being "flavour of the month" business model.<p>I don't have anything wrong against Zynga or its founder and so I don't wish them failure but this should have come as a common sense that they should have stayed private and stayed lean (both in taking VC funding and the number of employees)
I bet all the execs got well paid for their terrible efforts though and they will slide into new positions of power regardless of their merit. We need to take our industry back from the leeches. The near-sighted execs with nothing but paper accolades and networks of cronies.
Could be good to hear from Dan Porter again.<p><a href="http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/167244/Turning_down_Zynga_Why_I_opted_out_of_the_210M_Omgpop_buy.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/167244/Turning_down_Zynga...</a>
I want to know what kind of thought process goes on company/individual's mind when they decide to do an acquisition like this, for $200M, which doesn't make enough money to justify it.<p>You would think when you are throwing around that kind of money, they would do some rudimentary research?<p>How much money was omgpop making at the time of the acquisition?
There are too many people commenting on Techcrunch that are almost rooting for Zynga to fail and/or finding it amusing -- there are a still good number of people working at Zynga (with families and livelihoods at stake) and I hope they can right the ship and figure this out.
Zynga could possibly turn it all around if they achieve their goal of bringing real-world currency to their gambling games in the US and on facebook. That is a very tough road to navigate though given the current US climate regarding gambling. Globally though it might be an option to rebuild the company.
I never understood this acquisition in the first place. I was surprised to learn that OMGPOP actually did produce more than one game[1], but I had previously only heard of Draw Something, which my wife and her facebook chums had already grown bored of by the time Zynga came knocking last year.<p>Forgive my naivety, but don't these things have to get past a board of shareholders with a public company like Zynga? This isn't just a hindsight-is-20/20 kind of thing; IIRC the general consensus at the time was that it was a risky, ill-advised acquisition for a potential one-hit-wonder company.<p>[1]<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_on_Omgpop" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_on_Omgpop</a>
Did any OMGPOP employees have stock options vesting still from the acquisition, or was it all cash?<p>If they did have stock options, did they immediately vest upon termination or did they lose them?
It seems like a lot of their employees had the wool pulled over their eyes.<p>An acquaintance of mine who worked for Zynga up until a few days ago spoke fondly of her position and the company's prospects. I issued her a warning months ago. I think it just goes to show just because you have kids/mortgage/bills, etc you should always evaluate who you are working for.
Does anyone know the specific tax implications of a write-down of a bad acquisition? In this case and in HP's case it's truly hard to believe that the assets acquired are that severely depressed and I would like to know how this affects taxpayers via reduced taxed obligations of the acquirer.
The article just says OMGPOP is being shut down. Does that mean forward development is ending, or apps like Draw Something will also be shuttered?<p>Does anyone know?
I guess I'll have to get to work on the Draw My Thing-type browser game I'd been working on a while ago now if OMGPop's going. Me and some friends liked that game a lot.<p>My implementation used javascript, php, and canvas, but I'm considering learning ASP.NET by making this with it. Any thoughts?