Massively succesful social gaming company Zynga (FarmVille, CityVille) is ramping up for its initial public offering in the coming weeks, but a lack of data related to user churn may keep investors at bay.
That's according to Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick, who spoke at length about the company at the Reuters Global Media Summit on Tuesday.
"They churn quite quickly and they get new customers. That is their model," he said.
"I think they have disclosure issues, I think you are seeing their acquisition costs go up, marketing costs go up and they have very high churn."
According to Zelnick, the company needs to provide investors with more details on its user churn in order to give a clearer picture of its financial future, saying that the company "hasn't gone public yet because their metrics are sketchy."
Reuters reported Tuesday that Zynga will embark on its IPO road show starting next week, giving a series of presentations to investors before offering shares on Nasdaq, which the company plans to do before the year is up.
The social game bubble might pop but the monetization models fleshed out by the social game space are probably going to explode into more traditional game spaces. We are already starting to see this with online passes, VIP status services such as CoD Elite, or even the Fable 2 experiment where that game was broken into content pieces to be sold individually.
