Take-Two CEO Questions Zynga's Business Model

November 30, 2011

It seems like the Reuters Media Summit is where CEO's of game companies go to say bad things about other game companies. Yesterday it was Activision saying that EA would not make as much as LucasArts would off the new Star Wars MMOG, and today it's Take-Two taking a shot at Zynga.

Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick says that he doubts the Zynga business model, and has accused the social gaming company responsible for Mafia Wars and Farmville of having serious "disclosure issues."

"I would argue being the No. 1 player in (social gaming) is complicated, which is why Zynga hasn't gone public yet because their metrics are sketchy," said Zelnick at the Reuters Global Media Summit on yesterday. "Zynga is a direct marketing company, 97 percent of which don't pay them anything, 3 percent who do," he said of Zynga users. "They churn quite quickly and they get new customers. That is their model."

"I think they have disclosure issues," added Zelnick, suggesting that it wasn't being clear to potential investors about user retention and loss.

"I think you are seeing their acquisition costs go up, marketing costs go up and they have very high churn."

Zelnick also revealed that Take-Two is currently in the process of recruiting development staff globally.

Source: Reuters by way of GI.biz

Comments

Re: Take-Two CEO Questions Zynga's Business Model

Submitted by Freyar on Sun, 12/04/2011 - 06:38.
Considering how untrustworthy Zynga's methods seem to be with regards to customer relations and their behavior in public, I don't expect them to behave any better to investors.
 
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