14 DAY TRIAL // A video game analyst criticized the move that social game developer Zynga made to take video game development duties away from John Schappert, the chief operation officer of the game, and hand them over to David Ko, the leader of mobile development, and Steve Chiang, a vice president.
Michael Pachter, who watches the video game industry for Wedbush Morgan, stated, “Pulling a game guy out of the primary responsibility for managing the game effort, and putting a non-game guy, which is Pincus, in charge, I think that’s idiotic.”
He added, “The newer games are doing really quite well and it’s really that the growth of the new stuff isn’t offsetting the decline in the old stuff. So I’m not sure how that’s Schappert’s responsibility or fault, and I think this is probably ultimately going to be a strategic error that bites them in the butt.”
Zynga claimed that the video games that Schappert was in charge of have underperformed during the last few months and the changes would ensure that the company delivers more revenue and better profits before the end of 2012.
Schappert has acquired core video game experience supervising the creation of AAA titles for Electronic Arts.
Zynga is a pioneer of the social games market and titles like Farmville were at one point insanely popular on Facebook.
Because of a proliferation of clones and an increase in player sophistication, the developer was forced to try and create more complex experiences that have failed to find as wide an audience as its earlier efforts.
Zynga has partially blamed Facebook and its policies for the decline in player numbers.
The stock price of the company is now just one fifth of what it was during the December 2011 Initial Public Offering, with a downward perspective.