Thanks. This wasn’t a researched article, just quick thoughts … hence the lack of detail and the inaccuracies – thanks a lot for correcting that. Especially for the clearer info on Glu.

re: Glu IPO success/fail – granted, but think the key issue for me is that so few mainstream games companies ever IPO at all. IMHO there’s a big value-add to having a mgmt team that’s been through that experience – good or bad.

(incidentally – and again I haven’t gone back to check the details of what happened – how much of Glu’s downfall was exacerbated by the loss of guys to PF? How much by the surge of the iPhone? My vague memory was that they were doing OK until iPhone kicked in)

re: Kong – I’m a huge fan of Kong too, and an active user (although I stopped having time to play when I hit about level 30). I wasn’t looking for a “fair” comparison, I was looking for an illustrative example.

In this case, I wanted something to show how PF hasn’t fallen into the chasm between:
- good team, good idea, good market
and
- sustained, fast, revenue-growth

IMHO, Kong was *superficially* similar, in a market where there are few direct examples to pick from.

- SGN is more or less out of the picture with respect to social games, they pretty much ceded the game to Zynga about a year ago, toddling off to ‘do’ iPhone and now other wacky stuff like connected toys.

- Playfish’s success is no accident and the team is very talented. They didn’t exactly lead the Glu Mobile IPO — they founded Macrospace (a profitable 30 person European mobile company), which merged with Sorrent (the larger and VC funded party) to form Glu. The Glu IPO was not a win; the stock has gone from ~$12 down to ~$1 and most insiders probably did not have a lot of opportunity to sell before it descended. I’m sure people made money, but it wasn’t a fiesta — you only have to read Glu’s filing statements to see why. I’m sure the cash nature of the EA transaction has something to do with this formative experience!

- I think it’s a little mean to compare Kongregate with Playfish — Kong plays in the open internets, which as we all know, has been a significantly harder place to acquire customers than Facebook. The true value of what they’ve created remains to be seen, and could last a lot longer than the social gaming ‘bubble’ (equally it might not). PF did a very smart thing, which was to start a new company right at the beginning of a new and very attractive platform. Those of us (and I’m sticking up for Kong because we’ve done worse than them with Whirled) who pursued destination-site strategies over the last two years have been at a disadvantage — one, of course, of our own making. In fact we’re a much better comparison against PF — instead of riding FB’s wave we built our own social network (and a bunch of games on top of it) and struggled to make that succeed. Bzzt.

- I have trouble seeing how iPhone is comparable or makes a lot of sense as a ‘missing piece’ when you’re talking about a Zynga acquisition. Zynga has a title with more monthly active users than there are (afiak) iPhones. I’d hazard a guess that their revenue numbers are at least an order of magnitude over what any iPhone publisher is making. I’d rather say that iPhone (as a games platform) has underperformed, and Zynga has arguably wisely abandoned it, perhaps temporarily, in favor of focusing on the FB platform which has much better prospects for customer acquisition (I have no idea about monetization comparables).

Yours, pickily.

- Daniel