Zynga Closes Boston Office and Fired 100s From Austin Office

ZyngaLogo Zynga Close Up Boston Office: 100s From Austin Office Also Made Redundant

Zynga CEO Mark Pincus has confirmed the reports that the social game developers have closed down their Boston office and laid off two thirds of the employees at the Austin office – with drastic cuts being made to Bingo and The Ville teams.

Neither the Bingo or TheVille games have been doing especially well of late according to information from AppData. TheVille has suffered the most, hemorrhaging nearly 10 million active users in the last month. Zynga Bingo has seen a less dramatic decrease, dropping from 5.8 million monthly users to 5.4million in the last 30 days.

The news was picked up after Justin Maxwell, a former Apple, Sony, Mint and Smule employee tweeted about it. Maxwell heard about it from friends who were actually made redundant by Zynga in these sweeping cuts, who he claimed were given just 2 hours to clear their desks. Apparently it all went on while the entire tech community was glued to the Apple Keynote speech that took place in San Jose at 10am PDT, no doubt an intentional move by the company hoping to minimize the shockwaves.

Zynga just laid off 100+ employees (incl. my friends) in its Austin office during the Apple Event. Gave them 2 hours to vacate. RT please.

— Justin Maxwell (@303) October 23, 2012

zynga teams laid off this morning: theville and bingo

— Justin Maxwell (@303) October 23, 2012

TechCrunch managed to collect a few more details about the news, with one Zynga employee claiming that approximately one third of the employees in the Austin office still had their jobs. Their sources also suggest that the mobile teams may also be safe from redundancies as it is likely that Zynga sees that as the future of its business. The San Francisco office might also manage to escape any layoffs.

The Boston office was completely shutdown, despite the fact that they were close to releasing a product that management was pretty hyped about.

The news about the office closures and numerous redundancies has affected the Zynga share price, which yesterday dropped 4.96% to $2.21.
The share price experienced a dramatic drop earlier in the month too, after CEO Pincus announced lower earnings and revenue projections. After this announcement Pincus stated that there would be “targeted cost reductions” in several areas and it seems as though these redundancies are what he was angling at.

These latest employee layoffs come after a difficult few months for Zynga which has been fighting to keep its share price competitive after experiencing the loss of several company executives who have either left or been fired for performance failures. It has also had to deal with some severe criticism flung at the company culture by former employees.

According to TechCrunch however, it might not necessarily be the end for Zynga but there will certainly be some difficult times ahead:

“There’s still hope for the company if it can find a way to inspire remaining employees to stay and fulfill the company’s mission of connecting the world through games. But Zynga is running out of extra lives and could end up bought out and dismantled or have to further slash its roster.”