Sad day for the employees.

Top comment on HN says it best.

TheVille has been bleeding users, down from 26.2 million monthly active users to just 17.5 million in the last month. Meanwhile Zynga Bingo drifted down from 5.8 million to 5.4 million monthly users in the last 30 days.

This is a sad chart:

That's more players than will buy Halo 4, for a bit of perspective.

17m people is *a lot* of people. Now, the total gameplay time I'm not sure; perhaps Zynga would have better luck building franchises that can be *sold* rather than F2P. 1.7m users who pay $20 for your game is not terrible, but it's not as sexy of a business.

From a few years ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1041758

"> I mean how else do you explain that Zynga CEO [Marc Pincus] beat out Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh for CEO of the year?

If you'd been to Startup School in October, this would have been blindingly obvious.

Pincus was the closer for a reason -- the mood in the room was instantly I want to go to there, and the temperature went up ten degrees. Even Zuckerburg was hooting and hollering!

On the other hand, almost none of us young hackers would want to work for Hsieh -- his company's culture is steeped in an entirely different demographic, and he admitted as much in his speech."

"Ultimately, things got so bad for Pincus and Paul that they threatened to file their own suit, claiming that since Individual shut down FreeLoader, they shouldn't have to stick around three years to collect a million each. They never filed a suit, but last October, Individual paid them each $672,500, according to a report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Today if you try to visit freeloader.com, you'll land at the site of its former arch rival, PointCast, which paid next to nothing to make that happen. "That was the worst blow of all," says Pincus, standing on the balcony of the $600,000-plus home he bought in San Francisco's Cole Valley, a stone's throw from Paul's equally pricey abode.

"

"Certainly not every entrepreneur in Silicon Valley is looking for a quick exit. "Very rarely do you hear about people starting a company because they want to cash out," says Howard Aldrich, an adjunct professor of management at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "They have an idea or a vision. You have to build so many commitments and relationships to move a company forward. You have to be sincere.""