Draw Something Loses 5 Million Users a Month After Zynga Purchase
Draw Something Loses 5M Users a Month After Zynga Purchase
We may be seeing the beginnings of a lesson as to why it's not always the best idea to buy your competition outright. Mobile giant Zynga's game development philosophy has always been, "If you can' beat 'em, buy 'em," followed by the less welcome "If you can't buy 'em, clone 'em."
In short, for nearly every game that hits number one on the mobile charts, Zynga will try to buy that company, and if they can't, they'll just make an eerily similar version of the game themselves. Most recently, Draw Something developer OMGPOP agreed to a Zynga takeover for the cool sum of $200M. Draw Something was exploding in popularity, and the purchase seemed like a good bet.

But now the move might seem equivalent to a company buying huge amounts of stock in Pogs or Members Only jackets without realizing that some things that are popular are merely fads. When you buy a company based on one specific success rather than a string of proven titles, you're setting yourself up for potential disaster.
A new report shows that in the past month, Draw Something has lost nearly 5M Daily Active Users (DAUs), bringing the total down to 10M from 15M when Zynga first made the purchase. A drop that severe has assuredly set off some alarm bells.



Zynga has already put into place an advertising plan for the game which has companies paying to have their words appear to be drawn by players. Think "Doritos" or "Pepsi" or "The Avengers."  This move is to combat the fact that unlike games such as Farmville, Mafia Wars, etc, there really aren't a lot of fake items that can be sold within the game for real world cash, other than a few new color options.
Zynga's problem is that they didn't bother to make sure Draw Something had staying power, something you would think would be required to shell out $200M for a company. Speaking as one of those 5M who can  no longer be bothered with the game, it just got to be more work than fun once the novelty of iPhone Pictionary wore off. Yes, five of my friends all told me to download it a month ago, but after a few weeks of back and forths with confusing and repetitive words, it just was too much of an effort to keep up with games. This is not "Words with Friends" where you can take a minute and pick out a word to play. Rather, you have to draw a picture or a series of pictures to get your concept across, which is about ten times as time consuming.

The winner in all of this? The higher-ups of OMGPOP, who sold their company during the exact moment when it was worth the most. Even if DAUs sink to zero, they've still made their money and left Zynga holding the bag. Granted, it's not what anyone working on a game wants to see for their creation, but they must know that if they had waited just one more month to sell, they wouldn't have been able to command anywhere near that price after losing so many users. Whatever happens with the game now, they've made out like bandits.