Employees at neighboring tech companies can reportedly judge when layoffs are happening by the long lines of people walking out of the Zynga office with boxes of their belongings and by the unusually large number of people at local bars at 2 PM on a weekday. Zynga was never much more than an MLM. There was no skill involved in Farmville and its spinoff games, and it was impossible to progress far unless you paid for tools or recruited Facebook friends who might. I wasn’t big enough of a jerk to do that. It made the guys at the top of the pyramid USD1.5 billion, though, so I suppose it was worth it to someone. Maybe if they came up with another variation of candy crush. Zynga didn’t just screw itself over – it screwed over the whole industry, by pretending that their development approach and business model worked well enough to be emulated by other social gaming companies, which in turn drained the development and business resources of the entire damned industry. The industry, in turn, tried to compete with that model by injecting portions of it into other areas of gaming. It’s in part why games embraced microtransactions. It’s in part why “get to market first” stomped “get to market right” as a mantra. It’s in part why gaming companies started building games around their own “hubs.” Zynga worked hard to ruin gaming, and they succeeded.