If Zynga sounds vaguely familiar that's because they're the guys behind FarmVille on Facebook.
Apparently they are now rising and falling and I've run across an interesting article discussing the why and how. The crux of the issue (for those of you too lazy to click the link):
QuoteEventually, when gamers saw a "free" game - especially a Zynga title - they associated it with poor-quality games that would push them for money at every turn. Additionally, it became a social faux pas in many circles to "invite" friends to play as users became irritated with requests spamming their Facebook accounts. As a result, Facebook soon implemented measures whereby it became easier to block such requests.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/06/07/betting-farmville-rise-and-fall-zynga/
I'm surprised they've lasted this long. F2P isn't going to go away, but hopefully this means the simple click games will die out and we can get more "real" games like frozen synapse, X-Com, and ace patrol.
QuoteZynga Going Down In Flames?
Hopefully.
Zynga burned many small game developers by making near exact duplicates of existing titles.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2012/08/08/a-photo-retrospective-of-the-games-developers-claim-zynga-has-cloned/
There was a Reddit thread going at some point last week that turned in to a Q&A with numerous ex-Zynga developers. The company went from actually having ideas to wanting to just spam out reheated versions of those ideas without doing anything else. Sounded like the top brass had no clue when it came to the Facebook gaming population rapidly shifting over to gaming on their phones and tablets.