Ask HN: Why is Zygna failing?

Their r&d expense quintupled last year. They went from 100 employees to 3k employees within a short time. Maybe they had to do this, maybe it was hubris. Zynga's administrative expense also sharply increased leading to strong losses.

I have no idea what the user stats are, only anecdotal evidence from friends.

But their aggressive monetization approach to their -ville games led everyone I know to stop playing them. The games weren't fun, so burnout came fast.

That said, a fair number of my friends still play Words With Friends and/or Scramble, though largely in their mobile app forms. I suspect these games do not monetize very well.

It's built on a platform of sand (Facebook), and it's trying to monetize in the completely wrong fashion, and it's trying to run the company like an AAA studio when all it does is sell freemium web games.

Poor leadership, flimsy/parasitic business model, lack of long term engagement path for users, chasing trends rather than creating them, PR failure.

Zynga is a company that is that high school most popular jock that hops in front of all others and excels based on a small advantage in physique and looks and personality and bullies the others out of the spotlight only to be the 20-something failure who is realized as having stole al their charm from observing others' talents and mimicing them - and ultimately winding up a washed up meth head in modesto constantly claiming how great they would have been.