"Just recently, Facebook decided to change the way we view the games/apps in their application. No longer do I see Farmville or any of the others anywhere remotely close to my homepage. In fact as I write this article, I took a quick peek at my page—there are a few recent apps and games I have used, but no longer do I see Farmville and Fishville. "
This actually makes a lot of sense why we're still down here... It very much sounds like they turned off virality for Zynga. When I used to work there, every time facebook made a change, our DAU was threatened. I'm not sure what's happening here but does seem a bit like facebook might be unhappy with Zynga and basically strong arming them to comply with a specific direction... I'm just guessing on internal politics here...
Both companies need to play it safe here because if either company announces "We just broke up" the stock price will plummet in Zynga's case... FB would go down a fair bit too (probably to $18)..
I don't think FB will buy out Zynga, mostly because Pinkass is fucking things up greatly and it is also really hard to manage 3000 employees (many of whom don't really work anymore.. they just party).
Think about the stock price and its effect on Zynga employees. Believe me, if you tell me I'm getting X shares and then the value of that drops 50%, I'm no longer going to stay being a happy worker bee at the company. I will be looking elsewhere. My guess is unless Zynga is planning on offering the employees more stock, I presume resignation letters are being prepared. With all of these problems, I see there being some more downside a the moment.
If Pinkass wasn't at helm and let's say I was running the company, I would:
1) Keep all the games that were currently making boat loads of money and reduce the staff on them to about 15 - 20 people on each game team max.
2) Keep a core team of the best guys to do the next set of titles (mid core titles), ville is dying, they need to focus on mid core.
3) Pursue the Casino games. Put a team of 30 - 40 guys on just those games.
4) Have a team of about 30 people handling the mobile platform and building that out really well.
5) Fire most of the exec staff, they're bloody useless.
All of the above I've stated can be done with a company of about 200 employees. This is a far cry from the 3000 employees they currently have.
If all of the above happened, I'd say the stock would be on its way to much higher prices, but pinkass isn't doing that. It seems like he's struggling with the decision of what to do. His past track record of running companies have always fallen short after a certain point. It is almost as if his incompetence greatly increases as the company is faced with drastic change.
A CEO is much like the president of America... We need a Ron Paul here, not an Obama.
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