Zoo World developer RockYou suffers massive layoff

RockYou, one of the top 10 Facebook application developers, has laid off a huge portion of their staff today, according to TechCrunch. RockYou is most known in the social gaming space for their title Zoo World and their new game Toy Land, but have also achieved massive success with their Birthday Cards application. The developer, based out of Redwood City, California, has stated that this layoff was a restructuring of the company in order to support their new direction of solely creating social games. Though the article at TechCrunch reports that less than half of the company was laid off, a commenter who claims to be one of those who were let go today has stated that the number was closer to 70% of the company. (Edit: A source from RockYou has contacted us to correct this statement, saying that it was actually around 30%, mostly engineering and not game development.)

RockYou has raised over 125 million dollars in funding to date, and has almost 24,000 monthly active users across all of their applications. With all of the buzz around acquisitions, funding, and positive growth for social games, it's disappointing to see a major loss like this for one of the largest Facebook game companies. A quick glimpse at the jobs page on the RockYou website shows over 25 jobs available, most in the areas of Product Management, Engineering, and Marketing.

[via TechCrunch]