The game is already monetized out the yang. There isn’t much room for further monetization imo.
And to your point. Zynga doesn’t need for SG to increase profitability to make back their investment. They need E&P to roughly maintain its profitability for just 4-6 years to make back their investment. And that’s JUST E&P… the studio they purchased will eventually make another game. (One assumes lol). So this is an easy to win investment for Zynga.
All Zynga has to do is not screw things up. Best way to do that? Hands off.
I’ve been through dozens of mergers/acquisitions . They can range from letting the company run for 6 months to a year as they siphon out all the intellectual property and identify the key people they want to keep - and then shut the purchased company down to truly taking a mostly advisory role and letting the great management team do their things. Motives can also change as things play out.
I wouldn’t draw any conclusions one way or they other. Past history of the purchasing company makes a difference, as does the fact that its only an 80% stake and not a total buy out.
Of course they didn’t pay 560 million to kill the game. They spent it so they could get a return on their investment and how do you do that? You make everything available for purchase. Need to get that special skill to 8/8, no problem we can help you for a fee. I am sure the accountants are working hand in hand with the programmers as we speak. I have seen this in the past. These games all have a cycle. First they are developed with maximum enjoyment with minimal paying. Then as they get more popular paying begins to creep in. When the games takes off and begins to become a major cash generator the original company cashes out to a larger company who wants to make a return on their investments. I have been through this before, as I am sure many others have as well. I don’t blame the company because this is inevitable. I only wish I had found this game sooner and had more time with it before this happened. As far as the 80% goes what difference does that make? They are getting 560 million and the developers will be wealthy. They may have a contract that keeps them there and the 20%? Who know the actual reason.
Bro. Cmon. That isn’t the life cycle of THIS game. This game started out with the same business model as it has now. Low chance for 5* summon. Nothing guaranteed ever. And occasional guaranteed AM via purchase.
The model hasn’t changed and it’s been stupidly profitable.
Zynga would be stupid to change that now. And SG never changed it despite constant pleas from the forum goers. (Because it’s stupidly profitable no doubt.)
It isn’t about to change now, either, because it’s stupidly profitable.
Don’t over complicate this
Edit: I went through a merger last year with a game I was playing called UW. It was purchased by a studio with about as good a track record as Zynga (read: crappy). So we were concerned. But honestly we didn’t see any changes. SpookyHouse games bought UW and said “this is a niche game. We get that. We aren’t going to mess with what you have here. We want to fix things up, tidy them up a bit. Clean up the UI, the tutorials, the campaign. the user experience.”
You know what they did. Exactly what they said. It was a seamless transition with the exception of all the fear mongering from the players. A year later and UW has seen just subtle improvements and overall stability.
That’s what I expect with E&P because the game is in a good spot anyway and I’m sure they don’t wanna mess with that.
Because we’ve seen it before. Classic example is War Robots. At one time an awesome game, then mail.fu bought Pixonic and aggressively monetized it by blatantly selling power, to the point that it’s now painfully P2W, and players are leaving in droves. If the new owners really care about longevity, things should pretty much stay the course; but if they’re in it for a fast return on their investment, as mail.fu obviously was, things will likely go to crap in a hurry.
I’ve seen good and bad with Zynga. If they stay true to their word and keep SG running as an independent studio, with any luck the only changes we see to the game will be for the better.
SAAB perhaps is not a good example, Lamborghini, Ferrari, Bentley prob are better example. They can be big, as long as they keep the essence of the game and not be too greedy.
I’m looking forward to the day when we finally get to play PVP live. You can have 6 people playing Zinga poker, surely someone from Zinga can work out live PVP.
Royal Rumble style tourney with big prize like this T shirt
Honestly I really wanted to but couldn’t afford it at the time I went to test drive one anyway, and I think they figured out I couldn’t but it because they didn’t offer a test drive. I was legitimately bummed.
My wife loved ModCloth. I actually would go on there to find presents for her. I thought it was this little unknown thing. Then Walmart buys it??!! Wtf lol. We were shocked.
Nothing has changed with ModCloth though as far as we can tell. Their profits just go somewhere else.
I went to test drive one anyway, and I think they figured out I couldn’t but it because they didn’t offer a test drive. I was legitimately bummed.