We’ve written on several occasions now about the popular Draw Something app that hit huge popularity recently with millions of people across the world secretly addicted to the simple drawing game. Available on both the iOS and Android platforms the speed at which this became successful was astounding but the game’s popularity has started to fade, raising questions about Zynga’s acquisition of the company behind the game.
The Draw Something app was developed by OMGPOP and Zynga pretty quickly snapped up OMGPOP for a cool $180 million, after only 6 weeks of the game’s launch in fact. The app was downloaded 50 million times in its first 50 days of availability and was number one in the app chart so the purchase of OMGPOP must have seemed like an extremely good idea at the time. However after becoming one of the fastest growing games ever the app has now fallen to 18th position in paid apps in Apple’s App Store. Players on Facebook have also fallen from a peak of around 14.5 million a day and are now down to around 7.6 million a day.
Unfortunately it seems that Zynga purchased OMGPOP when Draw Something was at the peak of interest and so the fact that it is already fading in popularity is worrying. The situation is made worse by the fact that Zynga has recently seen its stock value halve over two months and its decline seems to tally with the time that it purchased the Draw Something game developers. Another factor involved in the Zynga fall is the company’s dependence on Facebook, itself a company that has come into question over recent days.
However Zynga is now attempting to justify the acquisition of OMGPOP by coming up with some solutions to make Draw Something more popular again and also increase revenue. According to WOGX, sourced from the WSJ, one of the ways that Zynga intends to pump up revenue from the game is through additional advertising and the company is about to announce a collaboration with DreamWorks Animation SKG to that endeavor. The move means that advertising for “Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted,” will be included in banner ads, video trailers and there will even be related puzzle words. A “person familiar with the matter” said that more advertising deals have already been secured.
As well as additional advertising, social features have already been added to Draw Something and there are also plans afoot to include support for more languages. Zynga also points to the strong franchise of Draw Something describing it as a “game that will live on for years,” according to COO John Schappert. It’s also believed that Draw Something could be included in Zynga’s rewards program with American Express. Yet another development could see Zynga making Draw Something into a multi-title franchise in a similar way to its achievements with FarmVille.
It will certainly be interesting to see if Zynga manages to reverse the downward trend in those playing Draw Something and maybe one day Draw Something will be back at the top of the apps charts. We’d like to ask what you think of Zynga’s plans to rejuvenate Draw Something? Why do you think the game has lost popularity in the first place? Let us have your comments