No more plans for online gambling.  I always thought that strategy was a disaster anyways, but what do they really have left?

The tweet that really stuck with me was: "Zynga gives up gambling... And hope."

So let's face it, this is an utter fail.

They've built nothing of lasting value, and they're going to have to reset.

Evelyn Rusli points out that in a year, DAU's went from 72 million last year to 39 million now:

https://twitter.com/EvelynRusli/status/360504777861373953

What do they have left?

A billion dollars and an ambitious new CEO who wants to build a mobile gaming company from scratch.

Something I noticed about Zynga's new CEO:  1. He looks just like a taller Pincus, 2. Seems to be just as intent on personal financial gain as Pincus. and 3. Is heavily hated by the gamer community.

Well....they better get busy.  Trying to sell the company or buying up companies.  The only company I think that can swallow them whole is Microsoft.  EA and Facebook might want parts, but nowhere near their cash value. 

Yeah, there aren't a lot of companies who can pay $2 billion and want to be in gaming.

The problem with Microsoft is that they know the new CEO because he's from there.

Chances are good they don't want him back.

And as Jason pointed out, he has a lot of enemies.

The biggest problem Zynga has is that their games suck.

Half their revenue comes from Poker and the two Farmvilles.

Getting into everything else was a big mistake.

Empires & Allies was fun until they made changes to the game that completely invalidated tens if not hundreds of hours of enjoyable work building up value in your empire by screwing users and changing the rules in the game to favor crass monetization techniques.  Pioneer Trail or Frontierville went the same way with massive changes that wrecked the game dynamics and changed the reasons why people were playing them in the first place.  Words with Friends too when they started auto-resigning from all the games I was playing with my friends because I didn't get back to them within two days.  Draw Something two is a big mobile advertising crackpot of crap.  I'd still play the first one if I could find anyone to play the original.  Now that I think about it, they've probably screwed all of their most loyal players over on every single game they've made by getting rid of the reasons why people liked the games in the first place. 

They probably need a whole new generation of product/game managers, or at least fire all the current ones to shake it up.