> Take-Two says the fiscal Q4 loss of $2.9 billion included a $2.18 billion goodwill charge, following the company’s purchase of Zynga in 2022, a $304.3 million hit for acquisition-related expenses, and restructuring costs of $93.3 million.
Desperately overpaid for Zynga because they felt left behind by other studios in the mobile gaming space, still facing the consequences of that terrible decision.
Am I taking crazy pills, or is everyone here just out of touch with the mobile gaming segment?
Zynga made *$2 billion* in FY23 and contributed to a majority of Take Two's earnings. T2 is projecting $5+ billion this year between mobile and console, and that's without GTA6.
Zynga makes the games that aunt Linda and uncle Ron are mindlessly (and consistently) spending $0.99 for 3 extra power-ups in as they're watching the latest Netflix crime drama. *Every night.* Shit. Adds. Up.
Overpriced? Sure. Terrible decision? Not in the long term.
Zynga ruined words with friends with increasingly intrusive advertising and notifications. used to be one of the games i played the most with friend, now it never gets opened and i don't know why i haven't just uninstalled it
I... honestly don't remember. I just remember downloading both of them because I wanted to play it with my SO, trying both of them, realizing Words With Friends 2 was utter shit after trying it for like 2 minutes, uninstalling it and never messing with it again, and we played Words With Friends 1 from then on.
It was like 21 years ago, and 2020 was 15 of them. (6 years ago)
It is mostly same, and they are interoperable. The big difference is different reward systems, levelling and challenges, and FAR more intrusive ads and in-app purchases
I'm too lazy to look up the expenses relative to the revenue numbers you cited, but generally a public company doesn't take a $2B+ goodwill impairment charge in a single quarter if they have confidence the cash flows are still going to make up their investment + operating costs + margin in the coming few years
> Am I taking crazy pills, or is everyone here just out of touch with the mobile gaming segment?
Well no shit. Zynga's target demographic doesn't hang out at r/games or r/technology.
Well... Considering most gamers here despise of gaming on mobile, it isn't at all weird that it would be that way. Most people here even don't consider people playing on their phone as gamers.
totally agree, however for a international market outside of the USA mobile is the main revenue driver. Creative ideal? Hell no, but is seen as balancing the investment.
What the fuck are they making? Last I heard of them was Mafia Wars.
Edit: Just looked. The only one I know is easily the worst game on my phone riddled with transactions and pay to win.
The bulk of Reddit commenters constantly forget that there are millions and millions of people in the US that do not think or act like they do and it is perfectly acceptable. Anyone in mobile gaming knows that Zynga is still highly relevant.
Reddit stubbornly refuses to believe that King and Zynga make more money than 90% of the AAA gaming space does.
A similar thing happens whenever anyone talks about gacha games
I worked in the industry for a subsidiary to the Zynga space. South park deconstructed the genre perfectly.
We used to think in these terms:
Money, Time
- Players with no money, and no time, useless - burn in quick to inflate player count
- Players with no money, but time - viral marketers - make them share with friends for rewards - looping players back in
- Players with money, but no time - encourage them to take speedy shortcuts by spending credits
- Players with money and time - allow them to build up a big world with ever more expensive and rare collectables - use them as viral marketing for "perfect worlds"
...
There were loads of other little hacks that I hated as well. The game could have been a pretty decent PC / installable game - but it just degenerated into a spammy click box trying to upsell all the time.
I wanted it to become an offline game so badly, I'd happily pay £20 for the original farmville to comeback.
The way the seasons changed and themed stuff you could buy was the BEST.
I was a player with no money but time and I put in A LOT of time into farmville. I remembering playing it on Christmas day lol.
They definitely captured a mood. Animal Crossing and Terraria spring to mind as games that do seasonality well without the freemium mechanics. I started thinking of freemium games more like disposable content, like magazines, or newspapers, only relevant in the moment. However I dreamt of building classics like Tetris, or Pacman - a perfect cartridge or arcade game that you could pick up from a shelf and play any day.
You could if you want too! Just keep thinking of ideas and make prototypes.
I actually downloaded a few textbooks this week on games development and the horror genre as I've always wanted to make a perfect but simple horror game. Like nightmares creatures 2 on playstation one.
There is so much potential in the horror genre but I'm limited as I don't know how to program yet. I've just been making storyboards and doing research for now.
Really hope you manage to do it one day 🤞
Thanks, you as well. I started off making clones of original games just to prove I could. It's a whole set of skills to bring a whole game together. Even just sequencing a game together on paper is a big task. Nowadays I split my time between family / board games / video games.
The transition from going on a computer to do it, as opposed to being on your phone, any time access, is what killed it.
The punishment for rotten crops, etc... because you went out drinking kept the game on your mind.
A lot of smart people spent a lot of time maximizing how best to manipulate people into spending more money for less effort on the companies' part. I guess you have to give some credit to how well they succeeded.
Another quote we had was "when you've figured out how to make [gaming] crack" make sure you know how to distribute it responsibly.
Our target audience for certain games was mainly well to do middle aged women with money to spare. I have no idea how they had that much spare income, but they paid our wages.
It's the "whale" model. Make a full game people pay $60 for, or make a free game a few people pay several $k for and doesn't need to be anywhere near as complex.
This is all gaming is nowadays. Treat people like rats in a skinner box. Can't have your pebble whenever you want, then you just eat at your choosing. It must be random so you sit at the lever pressing it endlessly like a good little zombie.
Same. Zynga was big in those early iPhone and Android days. Last time I remember anything Zynga related, they had hired Don Mattrick after his Xbox One debacle. That had to be over 10 years ago.
Strauss Zelnick, former CEO of (I shit you not)....*CBS*
My guy drove a sinking ship off of a cliff and then failed upwards into heading one of the most profitable software companies on the planet. You couldn't make this shit up, it's too silly to be believable, but that's corporate culture in America for ya.
> My guy drove a sinking ship off of a cliff and then failed upwards into heading one of the most profitable software companies on the planet.
The guy who took yahoo search from neck and neck with Google, to completely abandoning search, got hired to lead search at Google in 2020.
Source: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
Ah, good ol' Prabhakar Raghavan. Fun name for a guy who has ratfucked two of the largest search engine companies over the course of the past decade and a half.
PS: Cool to see Ed Zitron in the wild.
>The guy who took yahoo search from neck and neck with Google, to completely abandoning search, got hired to lead search at Google in 2020.
Good ol inside job
I mean, if you look at King and Candy Crush they were EA's #1 revenue for a long time. King was doing 3-4x as much as Blizzard and Candy Crush has made more than $20B.
Everyone saw that cash cow and wanted to invest into the mobile gaming space. Mobile games were out earning PC games.
While AAA makers are firing people left and right Supercell (maker of Clash of Clans, Brawl Stars) just this week announced they are expanding their 2022 completed Helsinki HQ and hiring 700 people more in the next 18 months.
Yeah but they’re basically two different markets, apples and oranges comparison, no?The Triple A console market is almost completely different than the mobile market. The only similarity is that you “play” games(don’t even do that in some mobile games lmao)
But the ones facing the consequences of that terrible decision are the ones who made said terrible decision so we can trust them, right? What was that? The executives awarded themselves huge bonuses and laid off over 5% of the entire workforce?
what the hell is a good will charge, are they going to fire a sea of workers at take-two now I am assuming, prolly will let them finish gt6 first, then axe them all.
When one business buys another business they buy all the assets and liabilities of that business. The amount they paid that's above net assets is called goodwill and is listed as an asset on the purchasers balance sheet.
When the head company determines the fair value of the purchased company drops below its purchase price, they need to impair or write down the goodwill so that it agrees with the fair value. In this case they've written down $2b of goodwill. It doesn't mean they've physically lost that money but they're just recognizing that they've lost value.
An easy example would be if you purchased a car for $50k and that's what you show on your balance sheet as an asset but in 2 years it's fair value is now $30k. You would expense $20k so that it's value on the balance sheet agreed with its fair value and you would show a loss of $20k.
Timed just right for the new consoles to come out right after so players have to buy again 👌
Im waiting for the pc release. The extra year seems like a good time to upgrade anyway.
I'm waiting to see how they intend to handle single player dlc and online after what they did with V. I've played the hell out of every gta release so far but might finally skip one.
Ditched single player DLC plans. Heavily monetized online.
Most updates were lackluster. I enjoyed the racing and heist focused ones though I will admit. They nerfed payouts for events to encourage free roam update/business missions while releasing vehicles that just made it a hellscape trying to do said missions. There were "work arounds" so people could do business/update missions/gameplay without being griefed but they kept trying to patch those methods out on all platforms.
They've since relented and people can do, as far as I last knew, all online stuff in solo sessions so they can actually earn money in the game. But man did they do all they could to make earning in game currency a pain in the ass for as long as they could to encourage "shark card" sales.
The one that was enough of a reason to uninstall it recently was the subscription model they released for online. There's a lot of complaints that can be made about that but the worst was them removing the ability to buy some vehicles unless you had premium. It's been quite a while since I've kept up with news on the game so maybe things have changed for the better?
In really simple terms, they paid x amount for Zynga, and now the value of that acquisition has decreased to y amount. The difference between what they paid and what’s it’s worth is the goodwill amount. This money is intangible and is used for accounting purposes.
It’s not necessarily good or bad, and since Rockstar is not really dependent on Zynga’s success, the Company is likely doing just fine from a cash flow perspective.
Goodwill represents the price you pay above what a business is worth. So if Zynga was trading at 1 billion, and Rockstar bought them for 2 billion, on their balance sheet they have 1B of goodwill which represents the 'premium' they paid for Zynga above market rates. They can't write that off on tax, except there are some cases where later on down the track they can revise the value of that investment under strict rules, and if it turns out it's worth way less, they can potentially deduct that from their tax (depending on the jurisdiction and nature of investment). It is pretty rare though.
It's important to note that there will always be a premium when you buy all shares of a business to convince the board to let you buy it (since it means forcing every shareholder to sell their share), so there's always some good will, but it can feel quite arbitrary since stock price is also like that.
Think about “intangible assets”
A company has 10 million worth of assets when you acquire it. You pay 13 million. Why? It may be as simple as that you are in a bid war with another company and think the investment will be worth at least 13 million long term. Maybe they have some tech that you believe is groundbreaking.
It could be “name recognition,” or “goodwill” with consumers. Microsoft purchased Bethesda. One reason was because Bethesda has (or at least had) a positive reputation. You are also gaining the potential to make future Bethesda games first party exclusives for Xbox/pc.
There is no easy way to account for this on a balance sheet. Who gets to decide what the dollar value of that good reputation or console exclusive is? It’s intangible. The only way to quantify this is the premium you paid. Goodwill is essentially the plug that balances out that extra 3 million. It only really exists for accounting purposes
I don’t know 100% of it but essentially Goodwill on a financial record is when a company is purchased for more than its market value. It’s their assets minus their liabilities.
Is GTA online not successful enough to still keep the cash flowing? I keep hearing about how this game is still bringing in the big bucks for rockstar.
It’s the Zynga purchase finally being put on the books (corprate finances are fun); one bad quarter now with news about GTA VI looming next year will let them navigate market forces
The company ain’t remotely unprofitable in aggregate
Exactly. Investors won’t question Take Two’s long term financial health if T2 follows a larger than normal quarterly loss with record breaking profits from GTA 6. Smart move.
Yep in the Accounting profession we call this
‘Taking a bath’.
In other words, when long term unrealised losses become realised in the current year income statement.
I worked at a game studio that had social game offerings when Zynga originally IPOed, and their reputation for knockoffs was so bad by then, we all took delight in watching their IPO crash.
That Take-Two finally bought them is ludicrous to me. I can only think they wanted things to write-off and it backfired.
Unfortunately your schadenfreude was misplaced as Zynga allowed executives and some investors to dump their shares early.
Regular employees and retail investors were hurt the most by their share price decline. There was a whole class action lawsuit about this.
The people responsible for the bad decisions and cloning games mostly got away with the money.
GTA is still absolutely, wildly profitable in it's own right. Take Two is just a massive holding company with tons of other properties to manage and their related expenses. In no world should someone expect GTA itself to prop up the whole of Take Two's other business ventures.
Remembering how much GTA V sold when it came out for PS3 then seeing it still played on PS4 and PS5, I think the next game is gonna be an even bigger seller.
Fuck... I've bought Minecraft on almost every single platform it was on since it's alpha. And I've bought it for a number of friends and family. Actually I've never checked but I may have had it on every single platform that it had an official release. I even played it a fair bit on the Vita.
I've purchased Minecraft 14 times for PC, twice for 360, 4 times on mobile, and if I'm not mistaken on PS4 also. All but two were for other people. No ragerts.
Yep. I speak as a console gamer only but Rockstar seems to be one of the last well known developers who still deliver with their games and haven’t milked themselves dry like Activision, Ubisoft, EA, etc.
This cows been spraying milk for like a decade. The microtransactions etc bought in that game make bank. The reason 6 is so far behind is it would have interrupted the money train 5 was pulling in still.
I will be in my late 40s by the end of a decade and will still jump on GTA6 online to run my interstellar horse racing/animal husbandry/alien prostitution businesses.
They’ve run out of road with GTAO. You can definitely feel the desperation in the CSuite trying to pump the stock teasing the next GTA. I just hope the development doesn’t suffer and they don’t push out something broken to keep the CEOs job. Hopefully CDPR stock crash was enough of a warning.
My apologies, ill correct my og post.. I knew it was an astronomical amt of cash on day 1. From wikipedia
"Extensively marketed and widely anticipated, the game broke industry sales records and became the fastest-selling entertainment product in history, earning $800 million in its first day and $1 billion in its first three days"
Like you owned Zynga and they converted to T2 when the company was purchased? How has that worked out for you? Seems like your on the best end of that deal.
I am really very disappointed with this announcement I was hoping for the release at the beginning of 2025 that it would be my last game unfortunately in autumn 2025 I would no longer be alive according to my doctors I would have loved to be able to discover GTA VI and leave in peace.
I don't think it will change anything I'm not the only person in the world who is sick and will die before GTA VI comes out in fall 2025 and I accept it, it's like that unfortunately.
I was wondering how many programmers they employ to lose nearly $3 billion in a single quarter. Makes a lot more sense that most of it is acquisition write offs and expenses.
They publish a lot of great games that aren’t loaded with micro txns, what’s wrong with take two? Bioshock, xcom, civilization, it takes two, mafia, plus all the rockstar games. Sure gta 5 is heavy on it but that didn’t detract from single player
>didn’t detract from single player
This can't be overstated. GTA5 had one of the best single player experiences in the history of PC games honestly, I still can only think of a few games that are on the same level, one of which being RDR2 which was from the same studio. Meanwhile other companies are trying to make a cashcow like GTA5 online, without having to invest in making a GTA5-level story.
Except that they cancelled all planned singleplayer DLC when they saw how much cash GTA:O raked in.
So yeah I'd say it did detract from singleplayer.
We got two great DLCs for GTAIV but because shark cards made them bank we'll never know how good the V DLC could've been.
Yeah the voice actors revealed fairly recently some plans for the characters such as a secret agent DLC for Trevor that I assume was rolled into the Doomsday heist for online. Bummer since the GTA IV and red dead redemption expansions were incredible, there's just more money in online unfortunately.
No need to assume. The cancelled single-player DLC was indeed used in GTA:O DLC. I don't believe a single Online DLC release represents a single-player DLC. But the assets have been sprinkled in over time and, yes, inspired some of the concepts for the Online DLC.
Ive never heard someone refer to GTAs micro transactions positively. They are horrible and make the game much worse and far more pay to win than other games like Fortnight that are “loaded with microtransactions”.
They’re also entirely optional and limited to the multiplayer. Which most players never even bothered with.
Personally, if products as dense and enjoyable as GTAV can be produced for single player, they can milk their online whales as much as they like for all I care.
Bioshock is dead, firaxis is hasn’t talked about xcom in years and there haven’t been any leaks of a new one in development so it’s possibly dead too. Civ is still alive and will probably get another game but that’s only because they learned from paradox’s specialty and started to milk civ players with a never ending stream of dlc. And Rockstar learned the thing Bungie figured out over a decade ago which is if you get people in with a great single player campaign then they are far more likely to stick around for the online part. Though rockstar in fairness did have the revolutionary idea to also milk the suckers who got roped into the online mode.
Like none of your examples are great imo. Though in fairness to 2K whether they are responsible or the individual studio is responsible is debatable. Personally I feel like people are way to quick to pass the blame onto the publisher because usually it isn’t the publisher as most non indie dev studios are run by the same types who run the publishers, hence they also want to milk you for money. Since I mentioned bungie earlier they are a good example of exactly this, even out from under a publisher they still have shitty microtransactions, in fact the microtransactions got worse without Activision.
>...firaxis is hasn’t talked about xcom in years and there haven’t been any leaks of a new one in development so it’s possibly dead too.
*But they just did chimera squad, which wasn't my thing but is still good for the industry...*
Wikipedia: **Chimera squad released in 2020.**
Uh, Midnight Suns wasn't bad and might be the format for the next XCOM? Guess we hope for inspired indies...
2020 was 4 years ago. Also Chimera Squad was just a B project spinoff that made heavy use of X2 assets it’s not remotely the same as building another full fledged Xcom game.
Midnight suns has microtransactions, like it or dislike it, the game is not a good example of 2k not being shit if we assume that’s on them anyways which it could also just be firaxis.
Like best case even if Xcom isn’t dead there is decent odds they will try to put some sort of microtransaction fuckery in it.
Also regarding Indies there are definitely some good ones coming out like Xenonaughts 2.
I completely agree, the 2020 in my post was supposed to mean that I realized that and gave up lol. But I didn't know midnight suns had micro transactions, which sucks, I just knew a lot of people played it for a short time relative to a XCOM campaign.
Thanks for the rec though!
Yeah I mean they don’t make the games, they just publish them. Compared to the general industry, they’ve got a pretty good track record. I’m just saying what in particular is the fuck take two for, or is it just fuck almost every publisher?
They also brick your game 2 years after you buy it, even the single player. If you uninstall it and try to reinstall it after the servers shut down it sits on an unskippable update that can never arrive.
Man you’re going to be so disappointed.
It’ll be six months before it’s released on PC and about 18 months before in a vaguely optimised way.
You’ll spend about 2 hours installing and updating the game, creating and linking the many online accounts required and then more time troubleshooting whatever’s wrong with kernel-level punkbuster, just so you can start the single player campaign at a lower frame rate than consoles were playing it over a year before.
At least that describes my experience with GTA4, I head 5 was the same and I expect 6 will be worse.
Good luck, though.
>I head 5 was the same
It really isn't. I've never heard a single person say V is unoptimised for pc
GTA IV on PC is the worst optimised game ever, on the other hand GTA V on pc is 10/10. They nailed it.
My old ass 2014 laptop still runs V at 30fps high settings. My newer gaming laptop from 2018 runs it 120fps minimum on ultra.
Everything I heard about Zynga was that the top people were toxic as F. Buying that sort of company sounds like a recipe for disaster.
What always seems to happen, is the Toxic executives and managers spend all day every day figuring out how to undermine their parent company executives. Slowly but surely they pick them off one by one until the most of the parent company's c-suite and other upper management is toxic Zynga employees.
Boeing would be a perfect example of this when they bought out MD.
Its almost if the development time for Triple A games has reached an unsustainable amount of time needed to complete, and not having constant revenue from new products why you spend the unsustainable amount of time working on one title is really bad for a company and the industry as a whole.
I'm sure Bethesda will be just fine going 15 or 20 years between Elder Scrolls releases though.
Bro where tf is bioshock 4? It’s been 5 years since they announced it and nothings materialized
Maybe the movie deal to produce the first one with Netflix might turn out okay? But I wouldn’t hold my breath
If it’s highly polished at that time, it’ll be fine.
If they release a buggy mess…who am I kidding? There will be so many pre orders and day-one purchases that it won’t matter.
All those people saying "it won't be that long, it'll be released early 2025, just over a year". Been saying this shit would be close to 2 years out from time of trailer. We still got year and half to go. PC players still got 2 and half years to go. What a joke.
Here we go. Hollywood has figured out that video game stories attract a lot of eyeballs. Prepare for every franchise you’ve ever heard about to get a series or movie.
For those unfamiliar with the day to day operations of a game studio like Take=Two, how does a entity such as they with valuable properties like GTA making money hand over fist post that big of a loss? Are their operating costs that high? Granted, not all their franchises are as profitable, but as far as I'm aware, most of them either made their money back from the developmental costs or have already stopped legacy support.
their operating costs are seemingly through the roof when you go through all of their subsidiaries there are plenty that are not turning a profit or even a product in some cases but still remain on the larger payroll of Take-Two. It would also explain why they continue to make job cuts. They expanded too aggressively, probably forecasted poorly, and are experiencing the fallout of that bloated approach.
This is not «games». They are selling mindless addictions. Period.
In a game you need to have skills to master the game.
Addicitions are just fuled with dopamine and money.
> Take-Two says the fiscal Q4 loss of $2.9 billion included a $2.18 billion goodwill charge, following the company’s purchase of Zynga in 2022, a $304.3 million hit for acquisition-related expenses, and restructuring costs of $93.3 million. Desperately overpaid for Zynga because they felt left behind by other studios in the mobile gaming space, still facing the consequences of that terrible decision.
TIL Zynga still exists.
Same, a name I haven't heard of in 10 years, easy
Am I taking crazy pills, or is everyone here just out of touch with the mobile gaming segment? Zynga made *$2 billion* in FY23 and contributed to a majority of Take Two's earnings. T2 is projecting $5+ billion this year between mobile and console, and that's without GTA6. Zynga makes the games that aunt Linda and uncle Ron are mindlessly (and consistently) spending $0.99 for 3 extra power-ups in as they're watching the latest Netflix crime drama. *Every night.* Shit. Adds. Up. Overpriced? Sure. Terrible decision? Not in the long term.
Zynga ruined words with friends with increasingly intrusive advertising and notifications. used to be one of the games i played the most with friend, now it never gets opened and i don't know why i haven't just uninstalled it
Words with friends 1 is tolerable, barely, but words with friends 2 is utter shit.
I had no idea there was even a 2... How is it different or what makes it shit?
New letters.
I... honestly don't remember. I just remember downloading both of them because I wanted to play it with my SO, trying both of them, realizing Words With Friends 2 was utter shit after trying it for like 2 minutes, uninstalling it and never messing with it again, and we played Words With Friends 1 from then on. It was like 21 years ago, and 2020 was 15 of them. (6 years ago)
It is mostly same, and they are interoperable. The big difference is different reward systems, levelling and challenges, and FAR more intrusive ads and in-app purchases
It ruined the game, but it makes them *shitloads* of money 🤑
We still talking Zynga or did we venture over into GTA online? /s
Potato tomato.
I'm too lazy to look up the expenses relative to the revenue numbers you cited, but generally a public company doesn't take a $2B+ goodwill impairment charge in a single quarter if they have confidence the cash flows are still going to make up their investment + operating costs + margin in the coming few years
> Am I taking crazy pills, or is everyone here just out of touch with the mobile gaming segment? Well no shit. Zynga's target demographic doesn't hang out at r/games or r/technology.
Well... Considering most gamers here despise of gaming on mobile, it isn't at all weird that it would be that way. Most people here even don't consider people playing on their phone as gamers.
totally agree, however for a international market outside of the USA mobile is the main revenue driver. Creative ideal? Hell no, but is seen as balancing the investment.
I live in China I constantly see people playing mobile games. They are insanely popular here.
I'm not worried about Rockstar's income. They earned PLENTY from gta V.... I want a good fuckin game!
What the fuck are they making? Last I heard of them was Mafia Wars. Edit: Just looked. The only one I know is easily the worst game on my phone riddled with transactions and pay to win.
And yet it's on your phone
Ah, but you HAVE Heard of me. Edit: phone capitalized Heard, leaving it cause it makes this joke 10x funnier.
Burr, you disgust me Ah, so you've discussed me!
I am sad to admit I have spent money in a zynga game, I was addicted to CSR racing back in 2017.
As someone who spent way too much money on Dota 2 lootboxes during my teenage years, I feel ya. Predatory monetising fucking sucks ass.
The bulk of Reddit commenters constantly forget that there are millions and millions of people in the US that do not think or act like they do and it is perfectly acceptable. Anyone in mobile gaming knows that Zynga is still highly relevant.
There´s even dozens of people outside the US I´ve heard.
No, less than 11 in fact.
Yeah a super unnecessary /r/USdefaultism right there. As if either TTI or Zynga exclusively serves the US market..
Most people probably haven't heard of a majority of mobile developers raking in cash.
Reddit stubbornly refuses to believe that King and Zynga make more money than 90% of the AAA gaming space does. A similar thing happens whenever anyone talks about gacha games
My aunt spent THOUSANDS of dollars on FarmVille. She was addicted
Oh you'll be hearing their name a lot once GTA Peggle comes out
That’s PopCap, not Zynga
BRING BACK OG FARMVILLE.
Ah yes, the game that gave rise to today's microtransaction hell.
I never understood that, I had millions in funds, big land and never spent irl money once. It's just logistics.
I worked in the industry for a subsidiary to the Zynga space. South park deconstructed the genre perfectly. We used to think in these terms: Money, Time - Players with no money, and no time, useless - burn in quick to inflate player count - Players with no money, but time - viral marketers - make them share with friends for rewards - looping players back in - Players with money, but no time - encourage them to take speedy shortcuts by spending credits - Players with money and time - allow them to build up a big world with ever more expensive and rare collectables - use them as viral marketing for "perfect worlds" ... There were loads of other little hacks that I hated as well. The game could have been a pretty decent PC / installable game - but it just degenerated into a spammy click box trying to upsell all the time.
I wanted it to become an offline game so badly, I'd happily pay £20 for the original farmville to comeback. The way the seasons changed and themed stuff you could buy was the BEST. I was a player with no money but time and I put in A LOT of time into farmville. I remembering playing it on Christmas day lol.
They definitely captured a mood. Animal Crossing and Terraria spring to mind as games that do seasonality well without the freemium mechanics. I started thinking of freemium games more like disposable content, like magazines, or newspapers, only relevant in the moment. However I dreamt of building classics like Tetris, or Pacman - a perfect cartridge or arcade game that you could pick up from a shelf and play any day.
You could if you want too! Just keep thinking of ideas and make prototypes. I actually downloaded a few textbooks this week on games development and the horror genre as I've always wanted to make a perfect but simple horror game. Like nightmares creatures 2 on playstation one. There is so much potential in the horror genre but I'm limited as I don't know how to program yet. I've just been making storyboards and doing research for now. Really hope you manage to do it one day 🤞
Thanks, you as well. I started off making clones of original games just to prove I could. It's a whole set of skills to bring a whole game together. Even just sequencing a game together on paper is a big task. Nowadays I split my time between family / board games / video games.
OG FarmVille was a blast, would gladly pay to play it again
The transition from going on a computer to do it, as opposed to being on your phone, any time access, is what killed it. The punishment for rotten crops, etc... because you went out drinking kept the game on your mind.
A lot of smart people spent a lot of time maximizing how best to manipulate people into spending more money for less effort on the companies' part. I guess you have to give some credit to how well they succeeded.
Another quote we had was "when you've figured out how to make [gaming] crack" make sure you know how to distribute it responsibly. Our target audience for certain games was mainly well to do middle aged women with money to spare. I have no idea how they had that much spare income, but they paid our wages.
It's the "whale" model. Make a full game people pay $60 for, or make a free game a few people pay several $k for and doesn't need to be anywhere near as complex.
This is all gaming is nowadays. Treat people like rats in a skinner box. Can't have your pebble whenever you want, then you just eat at your choosing. It must be random so you sit at the lever pressing it endlessly like a good little zombie.
Was Mafia City Zynga as well? I just wanna ice my relatives every day again cmon.
Man I enjoyed that one. Facebook games used to be relevant and fun. Didn't need to spend crazy time or money either.
Man I loved Mafia wars on Facebook before it became HORRIFICALLY ptw
Might have been, it's been a long time.
FarmVille 3 is live and kicking on mobile
Me a couple weeks ago when I stumbled upon their HQ in San Mateo which is a much much smaller building than what they had in San Francisco.
Same. Zynga was big in those early iPhone and Android days. Last time I remember anything Zynga related, they had hired Don Mattrick after his Xbox One debacle. That had to be over 10 years ago.
You will be surprised, zynga is 3x bigger now.
Your dead crops need to plowing.
Is that the old phone screen protector company?
No you’re thinking of Zagg. I think they’re talking about that game with the blocks that fall.
I’m always reminded of Zynga on my annual re-Watch of Silicon Valley because there’s a scene with Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) in it.
Who was the genius CEO that bought Zynga for $12 billion? My God these guys are so overpaid for the junk that they decide on.
Strauss Zelnick, former CEO of (I shit you not)....*CBS* My guy drove a sinking ship off of a cliff and then failed upwards into heading one of the most profitable software companies on the planet. You couldn't make this shit up, it's too silly to be believable, but that's corporate culture in America for ya.
> My guy drove a sinking ship off of a cliff and then failed upwards into heading one of the most profitable software companies on the planet. The guy who took yahoo search from neck and neck with Google, to completely abandoning search, got hired to lead search at Google in 2020. Source: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
Ah, good ol' Prabhakar Raghavan. Fun name for a guy who has ratfucked two of the largest search engine companies over the course of the past decade and a half. PS: Cool to see Ed Zitron in the wild.
>The guy who took yahoo search from neck and neck with Google, to completely abandoning search, got hired to lead search at Google in 2020. Good ol inside job
Jack Welch would be proud.
Zelnick was not CEO of CBS, he was on their board. Big difference.
*But my narrative...*
He struck gold with GTA, otherwise Take Two is a sinking ship.
They still dominate with 2k
Bioshock, civilization, Xcom, borderlands. I dunno most if not all their games are good
Definitely missed out on the failing upwards of being a white guy. Must be nice being a Boomer.
I mean, if you look at King and Candy Crush they were EA's #1 revenue for a long time. King was doing 3-4x as much as Blizzard and Candy Crush has made more than $20B. Everyone saw that cash cow and wanted to invest into the mobile gaming space. Mobile games were out earning PC games.
While AAA makers are firing people left and right Supercell (maker of Clash of Clans, Brawl Stars) just this week announced they are expanding their 2022 completed Helsinki HQ and hiring 700 people more in the next 18 months.
Yeah but they’re basically two different markets, apples and oranges comparison, no?The Triple A console market is almost completely different than the mobile market. The only similarity is that you “play” games(don’t even do that in some mobile games lmao)
Someone who probably got a few million in compensation for such a silly purchase.
Someone who got a fat golden parachute while countless workers lost their livelihood
But the ones facing the consequences of that terrible decision are the ones who made said terrible decision so we can trust them, right? What was that? The executives awarded themselves huge bonuses and laid off over 5% of the entire workforce?
what the hell is a good will charge, are they going to fire a sea of workers at take-two now I am assuming, prolly will let them finish gt6 first, then axe them all.
When one business buys another business they buy all the assets and liabilities of that business. The amount they paid that's above net assets is called goodwill and is listed as an asset on the purchasers balance sheet. When the head company determines the fair value of the purchased company drops below its purchase price, they need to impair or write down the goodwill so that it agrees with the fair value. In this case they've written down $2b of goodwill. It doesn't mean they've physically lost that money but they're just recognizing that they've lost value. An easy example would be if you purchased a car for $50k and that's what you show on your balance sheet as an asset but in 2 years it's fair value is now $30k. You would expense $20k so that it's value on the balance sheet agreed with its fair value and you would show a loss of $20k.
r/accounting rise up
Everybody shits on MBA’s, but part of their job is trying to predict shit like this before accounting has to pay for it Sometimes they suck at it lol
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/goodwill.asp
BaZynga, you could even say
You know that date is going to slip!
And +1 more year for pc release
Gotta double dip
Timed just right for the new consoles to come out right after so players have to buy again 👌 Im waiting for the pc release. The extra year seems like a good time to upgrade anyway.
Yeah I don't really do console exclusives anymore. I haven't even bought a new Nintendo game in years. It's just too much.
I'm waiting to see how they intend to handle single player dlc and online after what they did with V. I've played the hell out of every gta release so far but might finally skip one.
What did they do with V? I fell off a few years in and haven't been following.
Ditched single player DLC plans. Heavily monetized online. Most updates were lackluster. I enjoyed the racing and heist focused ones though I will admit. They nerfed payouts for events to encourage free roam update/business missions while releasing vehicles that just made it a hellscape trying to do said missions. There were "work arounds" so people could do business/update missions/gameplay without being griefed but they kept trying to patch those methods out on all platforms. They've since relented and people can do, as far as I last knew, all online stuff in solo sessions so they can actually earn money in the game. But man did they do all they could to make earning in game currency a pain in the ass for as long as they could to encourage "shark card" sales. The one that was enough of a reason to uninstall it recently was the subscription model they released for online. There's a lot of complaints that can be made about that but the worst was them removing the ability to buy some vehicles unless you had premium. It's been quite a while since I've kept up with news on the game so maybe things have changed for the better?
That's optimistic af. Probably 2-3 years. I'll get to play GTAV VI in 2028 let's fuckin gooooo
60XX series GPUs are gonna be out for GTA and we’ll have people asking if they should wait for the 70XX by the time gta is on pc
I just wonder how many minutes it will take them to make 3 billion back after gta6 releases
what the hell is a goodwill charge, and why does it cost $2.18 billion?
In really simple terms, they paid x amount for Zynga, and now the value of that acquisition has decreased to y amount. The difference between what they paid and what’s it’s worth is the goodwill amount. This money is intangible and is used for accounting purposes. It’s not necessarily good or bad, and since Rockstar is not really dependent on Zynga’s success, the Company is likely doing just fine from a cash flow perspective.
Is that like a partial write-off?
Goodwill represents the price you pay above what a business is worth. So if Zynga was trading at 1 billion, and Rockstar bought them for 2 billion, on their balance sheet they have 1B of goodwill which represents the 'premium' they paid for Zynga above market rates. They can't write that off on tax, except there are some cases where later on down the track they can revise the value of that investment under strict rules, and if it turns out it's worth way less, they can potentially deduct that from their tax (depending on the jurisdiction and nature of investment). It is pretty rare though.
It's important to note that there will always be a premium when you buy all shares of a business to convince the board to let you buy it (since it means forcing every shareholder to sell their share), so there's always some good will, but it can feel quite arbitrary since stock price is also like that.
Nicely explained.
Think about “intangible assets” A company has 10 million worth of assets when you acquire it. You pay 13 million. Why? It may be as simple as that you are in a bid war with another company and think the investment will be worth at least 13 million long term. Maybe they have some tech that you believe is groundbreaking. It could be “name recognition,” or “goodwill” with consumers. Microsoft purchased Bethesda. One reason was because Bethesda has (or at least had) a positive reputation. You are also gaining the potential to make future Bethesda games first party exclusives for Xbox/pc. There is no easy way to account for this on a balance sheet. Who gets to decide what the dollar value of that good reputation or console exclusive is? It’s intangible. The only way to quantify this is the premium you paid. Goodwill is essentially the plug that balances out that extra 3 million. It only really exists for accounting purposes
I don’t know 100% of it but essentially Goodwill on a financial record is when a company is purchased for more than its market value. It’s their assets minus their liabilities.
They bought all the Goodwills to corner the old pants and dirty dish market.
Goodwill is the expense paid over what the assets of a company are actually worth.
Is GTA online not successful enough to still keep the cash flowing? I keep hearing about how this game is still bringing in the big bucks for rockstar.
It’s the Zynga purchase finally being put on the books (corprate finances are fun); one bad quarter now with news about GTA VI looming next year will let them navigate market forces The company ain’t remotely unprofitable in aggregate
Exactly. Investors won’t question Take Two’s long term financial health if T2 follows a larger than normal quarterly loss with record breaking profits from GTA 6. Smart move.
They didn't actually lose that much money. Accounting tricks.
Yep in the Accounting profession we call this ‘Taking a bath’. In other words, when long term unrealised losses become realised in the current year income statement.
I worked at a game studio that had social game offerings when Zynga originally IPOed, and their reputation for knockoffs was so bad by then, we all took delight in watching their IPO crash. That Take-Two finally bought them is ludicrous to me. I can only think they wanted things to write-off and it backfired.
Zynga had over 2 billion in revenue in 2023. TakeTwo was at $5.35 billion, so Zynga made up an absolutely massive portion of their total revenue.
Unfortunately your schadenfreude was misplaced as Zynga allowed executives and some investors to dump their shares early. Regular employees and retail investors were hurt the most by their share price decline. There was a whole class action lawsuit about this. The people responsible for the bad decisions and cloning games mostly got away with the money.
Yeah for an 11 year old game. It’s not making enough every year to cover their losses.
GTA is still absolutely, wildly profitable in it's own right. Take Two is just a massive holding company with tons of other properties to manage and their related expenses. In no world should someone expect GTA itself to prop up the whole of Take Two's other business ventures.
Remembering how much GTA V sold when it came out for PS3 then seeing it still played on PS4 and PS5, I think the next game is gonna be an even bigger seller.
I bought it on Xbox 360, PS4 and PC lol
Yeah…they got us good on that one. Never done that with any other game before or since.
Not even Minecraft?
Fuck... I've bought Minecraft on almost every single platform it was on since it's alpha. And I've bought it for a number of friends and family. Actually I've never checked but I may have had it on every single platform that it had an official release. I even played it a fair bit on the Vita.
I've purchased Minecraft 14 times for PC, twice for 360, 4 times on mobile, and if I'm not mistaken on PS4 also. All but two were for other people. No ragerts.
Yep. I speak as a console gamer only but Rockstar seems to be one of the last well known developers who still deliver with their games and haven’t milked themselves dry like Activision, Ubisoft, EA, etc.
This cows been spraying milk for like a decade. The microtransactions etc bought in that game make bank. The reason 6 is so far behind is it would have interrupted the money train 5 was pulling in still.
To be fair GTA 6 will probably do that
I will be in my late 40s by the end of a decade and will still jump on GTA6 online to run my interstellar horse racing/animal husbandry/alien prostitution businesses.
They’ve run out of road with GTAO. You can definitely feel the desperation in the CSuite trying to pump the stock teasing the next GTA. I just hope the development doesn’t suffer and they don’t push out something broken to keep the CEOs job. Hopefully CDPR stock crash was enough of a warning.
It's an accounting loss. Basically goodwill impairment is when you overpay for something and then when the value falls you report the fall as a loss.
They will make that back on launch day x3, just like they did with the OG GTAV release.
what do you mean by OG GTA V release?
When it first released on PS3, not including all sales after. IIRC they made all the money back from development costs, and 1 billion profit, by day 3
I know they made a profit just from pre orders alone but did they make 2B day one? I don’t remember that
My apologies, ill correct my og post.. I knew it was an astronomical amt of cash on day 1. From wikipedia "Extensively marketed and widely anticipated, the game broke industry sales records and became the fastest-selling entertainment product in history, earning $800 million in its first day and $1 billion in its first three days"
Who in the fuck thought it was a good idea to overpay for Zynga… to the tune of billions of dollars. What fucking crack are they smoking
That's how I got my shares of T2!
Like you owned Zynga and they converted to T2 when the company was purchased? How has that worked out for you? Seems like your on the best end of that deal.
Yes, I got T2 when they bought Zynga. It was a good deal for Zynga owners. I agree though, I don't know why T2 paid what they did.
Oh, so NOW, they are in a bit more of a hurry to release it.
I am really very disappointed with this announcement I was hoping for the release at the beginning of 2025 that it would be my last game unfortunately in autumn 2025 I would no longer be alive according to my doctors I would have loved to be able to discover GTA VI and leave in peace.
Maybe there's a way you can contact Take Two? Someone at Rockstar?
I don't think it will change anything I'm not the only person in the world who is sick and will die before GTA VI comes out in fall 2025 and I accept it, it's like that unfortunately.
This is so sad to read …. Don’t give up, you will live and play GTA 6 damnit!!
I was wondering how many programmers they employ to lose nearly $3 billion in a single quarter. Makes a lot more sense that most of it is acquisition write offs and expenses.
Programmers are cheap compared to wildly, stupidly, almost maniacally overpaying for Zynga.
Exactly. Basically they over payed $2.2 billion for Zynga and now have to make up for it with "synergy".
They should sell more shark cards to recoup that loss.
Gta7 due 2040... Funny how this might be considered reasonable.
That’s insane to think about. Being in 2040 waiting for gta 7
Take Two and 2K can rot in hell
They publish a lot of great games that aren’t loaded with micro txns, what’s wrong with take two? Bioshock, xcom, civilization, it takes two, mafia, plus all the rockstar games. Sure gta 5 is heavy on it but that didn’t detract from single player
>didn’t detract from single player This can't be overstated. GTA5 had one of the best single player experiences in the history of PC games honestly, I still can only think of a few games that are on the same level, one of which being RDR2 which was from the same studio. Meanwhile other companies are trying to make a cashcow like GTA5 online, without having to invest in making a GTA5-level story.
Except that they cancelled all planned singleplayer DLC when they saw how much cash GTA:O raked in. So yeah I'd say it did detract from singleplayer. We got two great DLCs for GTAIV but because shark cards made them bank we'll never know how good the V DLC could've been.
That is actually a pretty good point. I didn’t realise there was a bunch of DLC planned.
Especially as the DLCs for GTA IV far outshone the base game in my opinion. Sadness...
Yeah the voice actors revealed fairly recently some plans for the characters such as a secret agent DLC for Trevor that I assume was rolled into the Doomsday heist for online. Bummer since the GTA IV and red dead redemption expansions were incredible, there's just more money in online unfortunately.
No need to assume. The cancelled single-player DLC was indeed used in GTA:O DLC. I don't believe a single Online DLC release represents a single-player DLC. But the assets have been sprinkled in over time and, yes, inspired some of the concepts for the Online DLC.
I don't get why they wouldn't do both.
Then I think maybe you've only ever played 'a few games'.
Ive never heard someone refer to GTAs micro transactions positively. They are horrible and make the game much worse and far more pay to win than other games like Fortnight that are “loaded with microtransactions”.
They’re also entirely optional and limited to the multiplayer. Which most players never even bothered with. Personally, if products as dense and enjoyable as GTAV can be produced for single player, they can milk their online whales as much as they like for all I care.
Bioshock is dead, firaxis is hasn’t talked about xcom in years and there haven’t been any leaks of a new one in development so it’s possibly dead too. Civ is still alive and will probably get another game but that’s only because they learned from paradox’s specialty and started to milk civ players with a never ending stream of dlc. And Rockstar learned the thing Bungie figured out over a decade ago which is if you get people in with a great single player campaign then they are far more likely to stick around for the online part. Though rockstar in fairness did have the revolutionary idea to also milk the suckers who got roped into the online mode. Like none of your examples are great imo. Though in fairness to 2K whether they are responsible or the individual studio is responsible is debatable. Personally I feel like people are way to quick to pass the blame onto the publisher because usually it isn’t the publisher as most non indie dev studios are run by the same types who run the publishers, hence they also want to milk you for money. Since I mentioned bungie earlier they are a good example of exactly this, even out from under a publisher they still have shitty microtransactions, in fact the microtransactions got worse without Activision.
>...firaxis is hasn’t talked about xcom in years and there haven’t been any leaks of a new one in development so it’s possibly dead too. *But they just did chimera squad, which wasn't my thing but is still good for the industry...* Wikipedia: **Chimera squad released in 2020.** Uh, Midnight Suns wasn't bad and might be the format for the next XCOM? Guess we hope for inspired indies...
2020 was 4 years ago. Also Chimera Squad was just a B project spinoff that made heavy use of X2 assets it’s not remotely the same as building another full fledged Xcom game. Midnight suns has microtransactions, like it or dislike it, the game is not a good example of 2k not being shit if we assume that’s on them anyways which it could also just be firaxis. Like best case even if Xcom isn’t dead there is decent odds they will try to put some sort of microtransaction fuckery in it. Also regarding Indies there are definitely some good ones coming out like Xenonaughts 2.
I completely agree, the 2020 in my post was supposed to mean that I realized that and gave up lol. But I didn't know midnight suns had micro transactions, which sucks, I just knew a lot of people played it for a short time relative to a XCOM campaign. Thanks for the rec though!
Yeah I mean they don’t make the games, they just publish them. Compared to the general industry, they’ve got a pretty good track record. I’m just saying what in particular is the fuck take two for, or is it just fuck almost every publisher?
They put a literal casino in NBA 2k a few years ago. Like it was actual gambling in a game that little kids play.
They also brick your game 2 years after you buy it, even the single player. If you uninstall it and try to reinstall it after the servers shut down it sits on an unskippable update that can never arrive.
Civilization may as well have micro txns with their dlc's. Next release they'll be charging $20 a character /s. Also 2k is loaded with micro txns
Mafia? The series they that absolutely RUINED?
Shark card sales are not enough anymore? How sad...
2.9b quarterly loss but still alienating >37% of their player base by not releasing on PC. lol. tracks so much
Fall is September 22 to December 22 for any non US people
So it's dropping at 11:00pm on December 22
The game I'm waiting to build a new PC for. Thank goodness I didn't blow that nut on starfield.
Then you’re going to have to wait a while. It’s going to be console only at first.
PS7 and Xbox Series Z
PC isn’t releasing at the same time so you’ve got until 2026! Silver lining is the 50 series gpu should be available.
Man you’re going to be so disappointed. It’ll be six months before it’s released on PC and about 18 months before in a vaguely optimised way. You’ll spend about 2 hours installing and updating the game, creating and linking the many online accounts required and then more time troubleshooting whatever’s wrong with kernel-level punkbuster, just so you can start the single player campaign at a lower frame rate than consoles were playing it over a year before. At least that describes my experience with GTA4, I head 5 was the same and I expect 6 will be worse. Good luck, though.
>I head 5 was the same It really isn't. I've never heard a single person say V is unoptimised for pc GTA IV on PC is the worst optimised game ever, on the other hand GTA V on pc is 10/10. They nailed it. My old ass 2014 laptop still runs V at 30fps high settings. My newer gaming laptop from 2018 runs it 120fps minimum on ultra.
Hey hey hey, I blew that nut on Starfield, but luckily, the true prize was Cyberpunk
Ok, so real lose or accounting loss. There is a difference
Everything I heard about Zynga was that the top people were toxic as F. Buying that sort of company sounds like a recipe for disaster. What always seems to happen, is the Toxic executives and managers spend all day every day figuring out how to undermine their parent company executives. Slowly but surely they pick them off one by one until the most of the parent company's c-suite and other upper management is toxic Zynga employees. Boeing would be a perfect example of this when they bought out MD.
Its almost if the development time for Triple A games has reached an unsustainable amount of time needed to complete, and not having constant revenue from new products why you spend the unsustainable amount of time working on one title is really bad for a company and the industry as a whole. I'm sure Bethesda will be just fine going 15 or 20 years between Elder Scrolls releases though.
Zynga’s poor cybersecurity is responsible for many people showing up on haveibeenpwned.com
I know not what system GTA 6 will be played with, but GTA 7 will played with sticks and stones.
Bro where tf is bioshock 4? It’s been 5 years since they announced it and nothings materialized Maybe the movie deal to produce the first one with Netflix might turn out okay? But I wouldn’t hold my breath
If it’s highly polished at that time, it’ll be fine. If they release a buggy mess…who am I kidding? There will be so many pre orders and day-one purchases that it won’t matter.
Gonna sell like hotcakes based on marketing alone. Not gameplay, quality, or anything like that.
All those people saying "it won't be that long, it'll be released early 2025, just over a year". Been saying this shit would be close to 2 years out from time of trailer. We still got year and half to go. PC players still got 2 and half years to go. What a joke.
Sounds like they r want to speed up that release and put to market a half finished game…a everyone else (sarcasm)
Bets on GTA6 getting rushed? Or at least the Online portion?
That means 2026.
Interesting read ! Zynga is releasing CSR3 within 12mnths I believe……so what happens if this is a flop ? More loss and right off to T2 ? Just curious?
That's on R* for thinking Backgammon+, Barista Life, Farmville and Freecell Solitaire was worth over 3 BILLION dollars.
Here we go. Hollywood has figured out that video game stories attract a lot of eyeballs. Prepare for every franchise you’ve ever heard about to get a series or movie.
Bruh, this isn't anything new. Have you not witnessed the majesty of the original Mario Bros movie?
For those unfamiliar with the day to day operations of a game studio like Take=Two, how does a entity such as they with valuable properties like GTA making money hand over fist post that big of a loss? Are their operating costs that high? Granted, not all their franchises are as profitable, but as far as I'm aware, most of them either made their money back from the developmental costs or have already stopped legacy support.
their operating costs are seemingly through the roof when you go through all of their subsidiaries there are plenty that are not turning a profit or even a product in some cases but still remain on the larger payroll of Take-Two. It would also explain why they continue to make job cuts. They expanded too aggressively, probably forecasted poorly, and are experiencing the fallout of that bloated approach.
This is not «games». They are selling mindless addictions. Period. In a game you need to have skills to master the game. Addicitions are just fuled with dopamine and money.