Engadget - Social game monolith Zynga plans to shutter its New York City, Dalles and Los Angeles game development studios. Sources at Zynga confirmed the closures to Engadget, and also confirmed reports of layoffs affecting 520 employees (around 18 percent of the company's total workforce), and now CEO Mark Pincus published his internal letter to employees on the company's website. Apparently the ousted employees will receive, "generous severance packages" for their time; we've published the full letter below the break.
The latest high-profile company to suffer a data breach is the social game developer, Zynga. 218 million players were affected.
Cyrus Farivar of Ars Technica writes: Have you played any Zynga games lately? Yeah, we didn’t think so. And that’s exactly the problem: in two years, the social gaming company’s daily average users (DAU) has plummeted from 39 million to 21 million.
Techcrunch: Zynga has long been famous (or infamous?) for its data-driven approach to game design. The company never focused on building strong character IP, or intellectual property, in favor of releasing games that had been thoroughly funnel-tested.
Hopefully this won't have a negative impact on the their impressive animation middleware.
