Online Games, Zynga | featured news

Zynga posted first quarter 2013 earnings that beat analysts expectations, but shares are trading down after-hours on future outlook.

A year ago, OMGPOP CEO Dan Porter sold the games-maker to Zynga for $180 million-plus, and became the head of the company's New York outpost. Now he’s out. Porter’s departure isn’t a huge surprise, given both his timing (presumably long enough to hit certain employment and/or earn-out goals) and the fact that Zynga ended up writing off at least half of its OMGPOP deal a few months after it closed.

Possibly trying to hide the grim news by announcing it during Apple’s event, we’ve just independently confirmed that Zynga has shut down its Boston office and laid off 2/3s of the employees in its Austin office, including cuts to The Ville and Bingo teams. We’ve now confirmed the initial report from Justin Maxwell. We’ve also just heard Zynga may have an all-hands meeting this afternoon.

Japanese social games company DeNA is out to take down American rivals Facebook and Zynga.

MySpace has launched a new initiative to invite social game developers like Playdom, Zynga

Ready your virtual cattle and the Microsoft branding iron. Zynga announced today that its hit social game FarmVille on Facebook has now launched on Microsoft's MSN Games portal.

Social gaming startup Zynga is seeing some impressive traction. It now boats 129 million monthly active users across its portfolio of more than 30 games, according to both Inside Facebook's AppData(see chart) and Developer Analytics.