Good riddance.<p>I realize this isn't actually the end of them, but it's indicative of where they're going.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.