Zynga laid off 100 employees from their Boston and Austin studios yesterday. The layoffs came as a surprise to employees, with the public becoming aware of the move from a tweet. The tweet from Justin Maxwell reads: “Zynga just laid off 100+ employees (incl. my friends) in its Austin office during the Apple event. Gave them 2 hours to vacate. RT please.”
The layoffs appeared to be timed with the Apple press conference for the iPad 4, perhaps in a move to reduce the media coverage of it since the tech industry would be too busy covering Apple. Their effort to keep things quiet completely backfired. Things really haven’t been going well for Zynga and layoffs like this are becoming more common in the industry.
Zynga hasn’t been doing well for the past several months. Their stock prices keep falling, presumably because of their ties to Facebook whose stock hasn’t been doing well. They paid a lot for the Draw Something app, as in $180 million dollars, and the app keeps losing players. Zynga’s luck along with Facebook’s is making it look like we’re seeing the social bubble burst.
The social gaming bubble might pop along with it, but we’ll see. App-based games seem to be popular, but users aren’t connected to them in the way that they’re connected to console games. Except Angry Birds. That thing is a feathery, swine-slaying juggernaut. I bet that is the first time that sentence has ever been seen on the internet.
