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Zynga defends acquisition of Draw Something

Despite the game's plummeting popularity, Zynga still sees Draw Something as a valuable franchise.

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Steven Musil Night Editor / News
Steven Musil is the night news editor at CNET News. He's been hooked on tech since learning BASIC in the late '70s. When not cleaning up after his daughter and son, Steven can be found pedaling around the San Francisco Bay Area. Before joining CNET in 2000, Steven spent 10 years at various Bay Area newspapers.
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Steven Musil
2 min read
Draw Something has lost nearly half of its daily average users since early April, just days after Zynga acquired it. AppData

Zynga seems to have no regrets about buying OMGPOP, despite the precipitous decline of player interest in its flagship game, Draw Something.

The once wildly popular game, which most resembles the board game Pictionary, was released in February, and within the first two weeks, it skyrocketed with 10 million downloads. Quickly, both the free and paid versions were No. 1 on iTunes' download charts. By early April, the game had exceeded 50 million downloads and boasted more than 14 million daily users.

However, since its peak last month, the game has slipped to become the 18th top paid app on Apple's App Store and lost nearly half of its daily average user base. After hitting a high of about 14.5 million average daily users in April, when Zynga purchased OMGPOP for $180 million, the game now has about 7.6 million average daily users, according data from market analyst AppData, which says it collects information directly from Facebook's active users formula.

Along with the decline in the game's number of players, the company's stock has lost half its value since the March 21 acquisition of OMGPOP, leading some investors to wonder if Zynga paid too much for the company.

However, the company defends the purchase as delivering a valuable franchise for future growth.

"We think of it as a game that's an evergreen franchise," John Schappert, Zynga's chief operating officer, told the Wall Street Journal (subscription required). "It's a game that will live on for years."

The San Francisco-based game maker is expected to announce a deal with animation studio DreamWorks Animation to place additional advertising in the game, generating new revenue for Zynga, the Journal also reported.

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Watch this: Draw Something is almost impossible to put down