Thursday, 22 March 2012

Zynga’s Purchase of Draw Something: ‘It’s Going To Be Drawsome’

Social game giant Zynga purchased mobile drawing game sensation Draw Something creator OMGPOP Wednesday for a rumored $210 million in cash and employee retention payments.

The popular game has been downloaded over 30 million times since its launch 6 weeks ago, with more than 1 billion drawings being created in the process. It’s easy to see why Zynga, which is in the social gaming business itself, might want to purchase the company and its engaged customer base, hoping to bring those same players into other Zynga games in the future

Now that the Pictionary-style game is under Zynga’s umbrella, however, what’s that going to mean for the world’s most popular word game?

“The game is a huge monster. People love the game — we’re just going to support the game,” Zynga CMO David Ko told Mashable.

Now that the game is part of Zynga, the company plans to let things continue to run as they have been, except now under the Zynga umbrella. Rather than simply putting a Zynga label on the game, it plans to help the existing developers improve performance issues within Draw Something, find new developers to work on the game, and help the existing OMGPOP staff plan new games for the future.

OMGPOP was made up of a fairly small staff of people. “There are more features people want in the game, and there’s no way we could scale enough people fast enough,” said OMGPOP CEO Dan Porter. “The game is so large that you need a really big scale.” OMGPOP hopes that the Zynga acquisition will help give it some of the resources it needs to add those features quickly.

“Chat is a big part of the plan, but tricky because you don’t want to break the guessing cycle of the game,” says Porter. The company is looking to add a chat feature that appears after you’ve finished guessing a photo where you could commend or condemn your opponents artistic abilities.

Sharing is also part of the plan. Currently there is no way for users to save drawings they create or receive during the game other than creating screenshots on their devices. Porter says that the company is close to being able to integrate in a sharing feature in the game where drawings can be saved and shared with friends online.

Early on OMGPOP realized that words were a huge component in the game, and the company recently added the ability to add words on-the-fly to the game, a feature absent in its original release. Now words within the game can be changed to topics that are currently in the news. For instance, when the Hunger Games debuts later this week there will be 10 new words in the game related to the movie.

“Just like Draw Something is a cooperative game where two players work together and have a lot of fun, we hope to replicate that same feeling with OMGPOP and Zynga,” said Porter in a post on Zynga’s website. Plans for the future also involve creating more cooperative games like Draw Something where players work together rather than against each other and there is no “winner” or “loser.”

“It’s going to be drawsome.”

Source: Mashable

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