Zynga has officially closed the books on its first year as a publicly traded company, and there's both good news and bad news for the struggling social and mobile game giant.
The bad news: the company lost $209 million dollars during the year, and lost 6 of its 60 million daily active users between the third and fourth quarters of 2012.
The good news, though, is that it did better than Wall Street analysts were expecting: the company generated $311 million in revenues during the quarter, versus a $212 million analyst consensus.
Investors seem happy: share prices are up around 6 percent in after hours trading.
CEO Mark Pincus attributed the revenues to the healthy performance of FarmVille 2.
Is there any practical reason why that is lumped in with the game industry? We never considered PokerStars to be part of the game industry in the past.
But I imagine it's also pretty expensive to keep training new hires and upping the price on new managers to entice them in when 98% of the workforce leaves. It's not inconceivable to think most of that $520 million has gone to severance packages and promises in shareholder agreements rather than switching costs.
Personally I'm really interested in seeing if they can make the transition.
I mean, I barely ever played it, so I guess I can't complain, but it seemed interesting at least.
But I imagine it's also pretty expensive to keep training new hires and upping the price on new managers to entice them in when 98% of the workforce leaves. It's not inconceivable to think most of that $520 million has gone to severance packages and promises in shareholder agreements rather than switching costs.