Zynga is causing nothing but trouble for themselves by treating their user-base with such disdain and disregard. They're bound to create a negative reputation if they continue to have this this kind of attitude towards their players.

How much money could keeping active a game like Street Racing really cost them? 400k users isn't enough to make it profitable!??!

@Ian

Probably no, since they had to not give back somehow the money that the users spent on the game....

Or they really have a Kotick sense of business.

A user-base of 400k MAU is not exactly the same as a scalable and profitable game. Street Racing is a game that seems to have been released middle of 2009 (they even had an iPhone version launched in september 2009). Can you imagine what Zynga has learned in terms of optimization since that time?

They have a ton of Dinosaurs like these in their catalog and even if it sounds illogical, it's usually the most popular games that are the worst and the most expensive to maintain.

Did they fail in their community management? ho yeah, badly.
Is it a bad decision to shut the game down, they have more profitable business to focus on for sure.

They shut down their Risk lookalike, ATTACK!, without any prior notice. It was often the only interaction I had with distant friends, so I deleted any other Zynga games from my account, including Mafia Wars.

Blind greed and tone-deaf insensitivity is really an unfortunate set of attributes for a service-based company to have (and flaunt). Most of their gamers became gamers casually. I would imagine they could become non-gamers just as casually if Zynga keeps this up.

Yet another example of publisher/developer bad form and market disconnect. They just don't get it- Good business? How? Good business INCLUDES good service. These guys are a either a bunch of clueless tools, culturally and socially handicapped/ non-western foreigners (neither is excusable), or only looking at everything from the perspective of "profit by a factor of x", a la baby boomer. Probably both.

But the real question here is why does it seem no one paying attention to the last 5 years- the market, the industry trends, the rise and fall of companies because of bad management/models, etc? They are present at the discussion tables and conventions, they talk a good game. But there is where it ends. At the end of the day, they are every bit as incompetent and indifferent as Sony (was), Msft (is) and EA (has become but is trying to change). When are publishers/developers (and the profiteers/shareholders) going to start realizing that profit as measured by just monetary elements annually is short sighted. Including the intrinsic values as part of that profit is important to the health and longevity of a brand, be it company or product (examples: socio-cultural, emotional and/or motivational value to the franchise through to the consumer, brand loyalty, just to name a few). Have we really forgotten this stuff?

Man, in 5 years, the look back for many is going to be a huge slap in the face. And let's be honest- Zynga will be one of those.

Abraham-

"Most of their gamers became gamers casually. I would imagine they could become non-gamers just as casually if Zynga keeps this up."

love that line- hilarious and poignant.

Would it not have made more sense to have to have considered working on a Street Racing 2 and migrated accounts across? Even then, those that have spent real money on virtual items won't feel so badly shafted now the servers are closed. This is more like "hey, racing fans, you suck - bye!" by Zynga, and that will get them nowhere.

A large company who already has had flak leveled at them for months on end for other decisions gets more flak for shutting down a game that comprises of 0.2% of their monthly average users.

Yes, that's not a typo; 0.2% (439k out of 207,021k).

If the amount of payments hasn't been going in by any meaningful amount over the last few months, it's painfully obvious why they're doing what they're doing. The fact that no meaningful updates were happening should have been inductive of the situation.

I get that people would love to see others just run things out of good will, but one of the unfortunate problems of providing a service for free is that it could get shut down at any time. And it looks like next week is Street Racing's time.

Sean, accepting the 0.2% number for Street Racing alone, that doesn't factor in that these games don't exist in a vacuum. Zynga is a brand with multiple games (as their suggestion to Street Racing players to try FrontierVille shows).

So it's not unreasonable to think that if Zynga pulls the rug out from under you with one of their games, they could do the same with any of their games... so why risk going through that twice?

On a narrow financial basis, dropping a product that isn't performing to expectations may be exactly the right thing to do. But from the larger perspective of being a service provider across multiple products, I believe that how you terminate a product with a constituency does matter. And Zynga's seemingly brusque approach appears to fall on the wrong side of the "I'm a human being" vs. "I'm just a credit card number" divide.

I think that's what the commenters here and elsewhere are saying (although of course they can speak for themselves). It's not that Zynga killed Street Racer -- it's how they did it, and what that implies for playing any of Zynga's other games.

@Bart Stewart: The problem I have is with the indignation of other commentators at actions that are largely expected by anyone who follows Zynga news on this site. Sadly, it feels that many hate on Zynga purely because they can, not because it has actually affected them in any way.

I play Cafe World, and I used to play FrontierVille and Mafia Wars (I still kind of play the former off and on). If they pulled the rug on either, I wouldn't be indignant at the very least. I might be slightly peeved if I had just put money into it, but I spend a bit on Cafe Cash a month or so ago, and I've gotten about as much enjoyment as I'd figure out of it (my Cafe is that much more Metal now).

While it's certainly true that one could find concern in telling users they can switch to a game that is of the same genre but a largely different theme and approach, Zynga is basically assuming that at least some portion of the audience may actually consider the move and enjoy the new game (or at least enjoy it enough to spend money on it). We'll have to wait to the end of next month to analyze the MAU of FrontierVille to see if it increases more than normal.

Interestingly, when Zynga shut down "Ponzi, Inc.", they DID take the purchases players had made in that game and credit an equivalent amount to them in FrontierVille.

Well they offered compensation which is awesome, but really if they decide to close down a free game, it's time to move on and quit complaining about it (now that there's compensations), before you realize you're complaining over a free car racing game...