Zynga in the news

In the third quarter of the gaming year, Zynga has been through a lot of events which reflect the state of the social gaming market today. Zynga's daily active users have increased from 54-million in the third quarter of 2011 to 60-million in the third quarter of 2012, which shows an increase of 10%, and their monthly active users have increased from 227-million in the third quarter of 2011 to 311-million in the third quarter of 2012, an increase of 37%. This suggests that the popularity of social gaming is increasing, however, when we look at the statistics from other types of gamers, things for Zynga have not been too good. 'Monthly Unique Payers' for (gamers who pay for 'credits' on games) decreased from 4.1-million in the second quarter of 2012 to 3-million in the third quarter of 2012, down 28%. This shows that although social games are popular, the percentage of gamers who actually contribute to Zynga's profit is decreasing. This might imply that monthly gamers who pay for social games may be decreasing across all social games. However, even though Zynga had lost ome of their monthly paying gamers, Zynga launched four games during the third quarter of 2012, including two titles on web-based platforms: ChefVille, a social 'farmville-style' cooking game, FarmVille 2, Zynga’s next-generation game built entirely in 3D and the new chapter in its FarmVille legacy, and two titles on mobile platforms: Gems With Friends (the sixth title in the 'With Friends franchise'), and Montopia, a role-playing game in which players have to collect monsters through an adventure. This suggests that even if their monthly payers are decreasing, the social gamers still want more to play, meaning social games are still  very popular today.

 

This graph shows how at the second quarter of 2011, many people believed that the amount of Zynga's monthly active users could not increase - they thought that there may be a cap on the amount of users it could have. However, as I mentioned before, in the third quarter of this year, the number of Zynga's MAU's has increased to 311 million, clearly surpassing people's estimates. This implies social gaming may be on the increase.