A month after Zynga plopped $200 million down for gaming startup Omgpop so it could swallow up overnight sensation Draw Something, the pictionary game is already bleeding users, down 5 million from its peak, confirming many of the critics that figured the company had seriously overpaid.
That’s one-third of the total daily active users since Zynga’s purchase.
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It’s a drastic turn in fortunes Omgpop’s one hit wonder and its meteoric rise, reaching 50 million downloads in just 50 days.
But for all it’s ability to grab attention in spades, it’s had terrible trouble keeping it, something Zynga failed to foresee and properly deal with, just like they’ve had trouble addressing the issue of repeating words. And unlike Words with Friends, which can be played in spurts at your leisure, Draw Something requires large blocks of attention, while missing the competitive gaming aspects of its peers.
Not that it feels bad for Zynga, a company whose modus operandi has been to buy or clone all competition so they can be assimilated into their ad-laden, questionably innovative portfolio of products. It is then no surprise that their response is to enhance in-game branding in a bid to up revenue rather than actually try and make the game more fun.
The biggest winners of course are the Omgpop founders, who played the current tech-bubble formula to a tee: create a hugely popular product that makes no money and pass it off to the highest bidder (because apparently, startups that actually make money aren’t attractive to VCs). They even sold at the top like fucking champs. Fitting, then, that for the creators of a guess-the-word game, Omgpop so clearly had just one phrase on its mind.
