Massive Layoffs At Zynga

The company behind FarmVille just got a little smaller. Zynga, the troubled developer responsible for a number of social games, laid off 520 staff today—18% of the company's employees. The goal: refocus on mobile gaming.

"None of us ever expected to face a day like today, especially when so much of our culture has been about growth," CEO Mark Pincus said in a company memo today. "But I think we all know this is necessary to move forward."

Zynga is also shutting down its New York, Dallas, and LA offices, according to a report by AllThingsD.

The massive social game maker, responsible for popular games like FarmVille and Words With Friends, has been facing financial difficulties for quite some time now. Zynga spent $ 210 million to buy Draw Something, a game that immediately tanked, and they've had trouble figuring out how to make significant profits off their Facebook games. Last summer, Zynga's stock plummeted, and the company has been reeling ever since.

Here's the full memo Pincus sent to staff today:

To our Zynga Community,

Today is a hard day for Zynga and an emotional one for every employee of our company. We are saying painful goodbyes to about 18% of our Zynga brothers and sisters. The impact of these layoffs will be felt across every group in the company.

None of us ever expected to face a day like today, especially when so much of our culture has been about growth. But I think we all know this is necessary to move forward. The scale that served us so well in building and delivering the leading social gaming service on the Web is now making it hard to successfully lead across mobile and multiplatform, which is where social games are going to be played.

These moves, while hard to face today, represent a proactive commitment to our mission of connecting the world through games. Mobile and touch screens are revolutionizing gaming. Our opportunity is to make mobile gaming truly social by offering people new, fun ways to meet, play and connect. By reducing our cost structure today we will offer our teams the runway they need to take risks and develop these breakthrough new social experiences.

Because we’re making these moves proactively and from a position of financial strength, we can take care of laid off employees. We’re offering generous severance packages that reflect our appreciation for all of their work and we hope this will provide a foundation as they pursue their next professional steps.

Although these are hard decisions, I’m confident that our strategy of building leading franchises and supporting them with the largest network is the right one for the long term. I’m encouraged by our recent progress. Running With Friends is a great example of the quality player experience we can deliver, already receiving an average 4.5 app star rating from 22,000 players in less than one month after launching. Our FarmVille franchise teams continue to innovate and deliver ground breaking new social experiences like County Fair which, despite only being available on the web, is engaging 39 million monthly players.

I want to thank every one of you for the spirit, creativity and energy that you’ve invested in Zynga. You’ve reintroduced a generation of people to gaming and through these games offered them new ways to connect with their families, make new friends and even sometimes find love.

Everyone will be affected by these changes and I’m sure there will be many follow up questions to this email. If you have specific questions relating to your project or team, please talk to your manager. For any other feedback or thoughts feel free to email me directly.

Kotaku

Ubisoft's Massive Mystery. EA Back on Mac. And More Gaming Secrets...

Editor's note: The mysterious figure known as Superannuation in an expert at digging up what's hidden in plain view. All of what Superannuation finds is available to the public. These could very well be true gaming secrets. Read on...

In his CV, a business development person at Ubisoft's Swedish studio Massive mentions that he is "Working on the Business strategy of [a] tens of millions euros project based on a top grossing brand of Ubisoft. " He also talks about conceiving an "Acquisition, Retention and Monetization strategy" and the "prototyping of F2P games," suggesting that this is an online free-to-play title.

Word of Massive's MMO ambitions is not new, though there has been no indication previously that this is connected to an existing Ubisoft brand. Several days after Ubisoft officially acquired Massive in November 2008, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot told investors that Massive would focus on the MMO space, beginning with smaller-scale MMO games popular in Asian markets and expanding to full-fledged "RPG and RTS also in the MMO space." At the time, many guessed it might be a Tom Clancy brand MMO, given Guillemot's comments from earlier that year stating that a massively multiplayer Clancy game was at the top of his company's agenda.

Massive has been hiring for their MMO project for quite some time. In late 2009, the studio put up a few programmer openings for its "MMORPG team." In 2011, Massive posted openings for MMO level designers to build "a compelling long-term player experience from the ground up." Last May, a Danish gaming site noticed a job listing on Massive's site for a PVP designer to work on "a highly ambitious AAA Next-gen Online RPG project." A version of the posting on an external jobs portal described the game as a "AAA MMO title," and asked for candidates with "Experience playing PvP at a high level in a major MMO" and "developing third-person action games." Massive already worked on Assassin's Creed: Revelations, leading some to speculate that Massive was developing an online title related to the top-selling historical sandbox franchise, which has supplanted the Clancy-verse as Ubisoft's premier core brand.

Since being acquired by Ubisoft, Massive—previously known for RTS games such as Ground Control and World in Conflict—has contributed to several of Ubisoft's major titles. Massive turned a small abstract puzzle game the studio was working on into the puzzle-based Desmond Journey sequences in Assassin's Creed Revelations, after the Assassin's Creed team took notice of Massive's puzzle project. (I wonder if any of the other disparate gameplay elements in the series came about this way.) The studio also created Far Cry 3's multiplayer and co-op modes, and houses the team behind the Uplay PC client.

Additionally, several weeks ago Massive posted a job opening for a programmer to make mobile iOS/Android games in relation to a project that "is very ambitious and is breaking new ground for the industry of gaming and entertainment and is reaching out to both existing and completely new type[s] of customers." Perhaps this Massive MMO has a mobile component?

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Electronic Arts' Dead Space almost went in a somewhat unusual direction. On his resume, an engineer at EA's Visceral Games studio says he spent the latter half of 2011 working on a prototype for a social-oriented, "browser based Dead Space prototype" made with Flash. Intriguingly, the engineer mentions that they apparently folded work on the Dead Space project into some sort of Battlefield project. He then worked on a Unity-based prototype for a multiplayer 3D Battlefield game.

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Mac gamers may be able to enjoy some more EA franchises in the future. Recently, DICE put an opening up on its site for a Mac OS X engineer who "will be part of a team focusing on bringing Frostbite to Mac and work closely with game team customers and the Frostbite team to deliver an engine as great on OS X as it is on Windows and traditional console platforms." Frostbite, of course, is the engine that powers DICE's Battlefield franchise, as well as an assortment of titles like the next entries in the Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Command & Conquer, and Need for Speed franchises.

DICE porting its Frostbite engine does not necessarily mean that the infamously-demanding Battlefield series will be coming to Mac. The engine is powering 15 games in development at EA, including less technically demanding titles like forthcoming free-to-play Command and Conquer, and EA recently suggested that they hope to use Frostbite as the engine for most of their non-sports titles. With DICE also bringing Frostbite to mobile devices, incorporating Mac seems like a logical step for games that could very well have cross-platform components.

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According to several resumes, Patrice Desilets' recently "suspended" project 1666 was a next-generation title using Unreal Engine 4.

An engineer says in his resume that the prototype for 1666 was done in Volition's Saints Row engine and moved to Unreal Engine 4 for the actual game development.

Little is known about what type of game 1666 was, but the title and job postings mentioning "open-world" might lead one to guess a historical sandbox game. On his LinkedIn profile, a level designer says aspects of 1666 he worked on include "Chaos management, NPC interactions, Combat, Mission Structure, Detection & Reactions," which sound like the sort of things that might appear in a historical sandbox title. THQ Montreal was also hiring for a designer to work on the game's melee combat and multiplayer.

Also of note: Underdog, a second THQ Montreal game revealed by THQ bankruptcy court documents, was a Unity-based "AAA tablet game."

superannuation is a self-described "internet extraordinaire" residing somewhere in the Pacific Time Zone. He tweets, and can be reached at heyheymayday AT gmail DOT com.

Kotaku