Hasta La Gadget!

While Apple was busy introducing new devices and updating its existing ones this morning, Facebook game creator Zynga was apparently relieving itself of several studios worth of employees. Several reports on Twitter indicate that Zynga is cutting its Boston, Austin, and Chicago studios; our colleagues at Joystiq spoke with a Zynga Austin employee who confirmed at least two of his location’s teams were let go (The Ville and Zynga Bingo teams). Further reports on The Verge indicate that “more than 100” employees were let go as a result of the Austin layoffs. TechCrunch is reporting the full shut down of Zynga’s Boston studio, which was apparently working on an unannounced title before being closed. The company’s San Francisco location — its headquarters — has yet to be affected, nor have employees heard anything from upper management.

Notoriously, Austin-developed The Ville is the root of an ongoing lawsuit between game publishing giant Electronic Arts, wherein EA alleges The Ville too closely resembles its own Facebook game, The Sims Social. Beyond the lawsuit, Zynga’s faced declining stock value since its IPO, and the $200 million purchase of Draw Something developer OMGPOP remains a sticking point for investors. The company is slated to release its quarterly earnings tomorrow, which are expected to be down for another quarter. We reached out to the company for comment, but have yet to hear back as of publishing.

Update: Zynga confirmed layoffs at its Austin studio, as well as outlining closures at its Boston, Japan, and UK locations. A full letter from CEO Mark Pincus to employees was released by Zynga detailing the layoffs and closures, which we’ve added below. The company also says it’s closing 13 of its games, and “significantly reducing” its investment in The Ville.

Continue reading Zynga shutters Boston, UK and Japan studios, lays off 5% of full-time staff

Filed under: Gaming, Internet, Software

Zynga shutters Boston, UK and Japan studios, lays off 5% of full-time staff originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 23 Oct 2012 15:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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That’s right folks, after conquering social networks and mobile devices, Zynga has wrenched open a portal to the physical realm. Midgard. Middle Earth. Or just plain Earth. The company partnered with Hasbro to release board game versions of their video games that were based on board games in the first place.

Yes, that is a thing that exists: Words with Friends, the board game. In fact it comes in three editions, all of which have 104 tiles and a 15 x 15 board. Clearly a massive difference from Scrabble, which only has 100 tiles. The scoring and bonuses are the same as the one in the online game, except this time it has an offline single player mode.

Then there’s the Draw Something board game, which to its credit is slightly distinguishable from Pictionary. The Draw Something board game has players guessing each other drawings to get coins; first to 15 get coins wins. Note that Hasbro also holds the rights to Pictionary and to Scrabble (at least in U.S. and Canada, Mattel has it trademarked for the rest of the world). So call them weird – which they are! – but they’re not stepping on anyone’s toes here.

You can order these games either from Amazon or from Hasbro’s online shop for $15-$40 (USD) depending on the game. There’s also a FarmVille board game, but it’s a clone of Hungry Hungry Hippos. That’s just lazy. The Words with Friends board games on the other hand? I don’t care what the world’s craziest indie developer can come up with. These are hands-down 2012′s weirdest board games for me.

[via Happy Place]

Zynga’s staffers might have had a laser-like focus on releasing FarmVille 2 this week, but that doesn’t mean the company has forgotten how to take a break. One employee (thankfully, also a Reddit member) has revealed that the developer’s San Francisco headquarters has a giant, 16-screen video wall for gaming in the cafeteria — and yes, they’re playing Halo in that photo rather than some future, first-person version of Mafia Wars. It’s no surprise that the employees aren’t playing their own games all the time; we’re pretty sure that even the most avid Facebook gamers would burn out if they did. Nonetheless, it’s hard not to smile at the thought that the same people urging us to buy new crops are sticking plasma grenades in their spare time.

Filed under: Displays, Gaming

Visualized: what Zynga workers do when they’re not playing FarmVille originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 08 Sep 2012 02:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Things haven’t been looking good for Zynga lately. Not only has its stock dropped by a pretty large amount since it went public in December, but it’s apparently had to offer incentives to keep its employees from leaving. Bloomberg reports that the company was forced to hand out stock to prevent what analyst Arvind Bhatia calls a “mass exodus,” which certainly makes things seem dire for the social games giant.

The company apparently had to take such measures after it issued its quarterly report on July 25, which as you may remember, wasn’t so great. According to the Bloomberg report, all full-time employees were given stock options, and even though the company likes to hand out equity bonuses to employees at the end of financial quarters, this was the first time all of Zynga’s employees had access to them.

Will that stock be enough to get these employees to stick around? That’s difficult to say, especially now that Zynga’s stock is sitting below $3 per share. If Zynga can manage to turn its fortunes around, having access to equity in the company will turn out great for those employees, but if the stock price continues to dwindle, employees won’t have much incentive to hang around.

Zynga has been hit hard a lot lately. It’s currently under investigation for a questionable stock sell-off, Electronic Arts is taking it to court over the similarities between The Ville and The Sims Social, and the company just lost its COO after stripping him of his duties. All of this while investors continue to lose faith in the company. Zynga is in pretty rough shape at the moment, and it seems that its worries are only beginning. Stay tuned.

Zynga reportedly handed out stock to keep workers from leaving is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Welcome to the weekend, everyone! We’re about ready to dive into the weekend ourselves, but not before we deliver the evening wrap-up. As with every other day this week, today gave us some more news about Apple’s patent trial with Samsung, with Judge Lucy Koh interviewing each and every one of the jurors to make sure they weren’t being swayed by any outside influences. Apple’s senior VP of worldwide marketing Phil Schiller took the stand today to convince the jury that the iPhone’s design was unique, while the company’s legal counsel did its best to make sure that Samsung didn’t share any iPhone sales numbers. Judge Koh also said that Apple wasn’t allowed to keep its customer survey results a secret, so Samsung did get a bit of news that could help it out as the trial progresses.

Speaking of Samsung, it seems that the company is gearing up to announce something, but we’re not entirely sure what. At first, Samsung said that the Galaxy Note 2 will be getting a reveal at its August 29 press event, but later backtracked on the statement. The company did begin teasing its planned reveal for its August 15 event, however, and that one seems to be Galaxy Note related.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus both received Ice Cream Sandwich today, while the HP TouchPad is now (partially) running Jelly Bean thanks to an unofficial port of CyanogenMod 10. HTC was in the news a bit today, as it warned that in Q3 it will experience an drop in revenue of up to 23%. On the more optimistic side of things, it appears that the HTC One X+ may be heading to T-Mobile soon, so at least there’s that.

After hearing that Microsoft was planning to drop the Metro branding for Windows 8 and Windows RT earlier in the day, the company went ahead and officially ditched the branding this afternoon. A pair of Sony cameras were leaked today, and OUYA has announced that it will be partnering with iHeartRadio to bring streaming radio to everyone who buys the Android-based game console.

EA had its fair share of headlines today, announcing The Sims 3 Seasons and filing a lawsuit against Zynga for copyright infringement. Electronic Arts claims that Zynga ripped off The Sims Social with The Ville, and the publisher didn’t have any problem accusing Zynga of theft in the complaint it filed. Finally, NASA is gearing up for Monday’s Curiosity rover landing, and you can bet that tensions are high as we head into the weekend.

As always, we have a few original articles we encourage you to check out, such as these interviews with Colin Farrell and Bryan Cranston from Total Recall, which is in theaters today. We also take a closer look at the leak of the final build of Windows 8, and wonder why stuff like this surprises anyone anymore. Enjoy the weekend, folks!

SlashGear Evening Wrap-Up: August 3, 2012 is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.