Zynga's Stock Is Dropping Like Its Customers
by Jamie Young
January 12, 2012
The social gaming company, Zynga, has been taking a hit in the stock department. Although Zynga offers most of their games free of charge, the in-app purchases — and other purchases you can make on Facebook for games like FarmVille — are really bringing in the money. However, their stock has been plummeting, and on Monday, it fell 9 percent, reaching an all time low.
All Things D states they have no idea what is actually causing such a massive drop.
Well, I’ll tell you my thoughts on the matter. Take a look at the game they just released (or re-released, depending on how you look at it): Scramble with Friends. We reviewed Scramble with Friends ourselves this week, and we were quite disappointed — as many other players were as well.
Even if you pay for the game (there are free and paid versions), you’re only given a certain number of tokens to start with. You must pay one token per game. Once you use up the initial stash, you must wait at least 15 minutes for your chance to get one token. This is a terrible game model. I would understand this if it was only for the free version of the game, maybe, but when the customer pays for your game, you should not force them to earn ways to play like this. Or force them to make in-app purchases to be able to play.
Not to mention the recent update to the ever popular Words with Friends that allows players to purchase cheats. Zynga’s customers aren’t very happy, and we don’t blame them. Maybe if they focused more on not trying to rip their users off, they would be doing better in the stock world.
As a consumer, what do you think of Zynga and these recent app releases and updates?
