Zynga rides Drop7, Words With Friends to iOS success; what's next?
Zynga's mobile efforts have officially been tripled in the past few months, and it's all thanks to a little developer called Area/Code. The New York-based studio, essentially gave the company one finished mobile game just by signing the paperwork, Drop7. Last week, the company rereleased the critically acclaimed game under the Zynga name in both a free and premium, ad-free version for $2.99.
This sounds familiar: Didn't Zynga do the exact same thing with Newtoy, McKinney, Texas-based studio that offered Zynga a finished, successful mobile game in Words With Friends? After connecting the dots, you can already see what Mark Pincus and his crew are up to.
While Zynga has developed some mobile games to mild reception (even FarmVille just recently hit the Top Grossing App Store charts after a Farm Cash sale), these existing properties will bring more financial success on mobile to Zynga. For instance, Words with Friends sits comfortably at Number 8 on the Top Free charts just above--wait for it--Facebook itself. Not to mention it's in the same position on the Top Paid chart. Just think of all that money falling to Zynga's pockets at little to no development cost.