If you’re the type to follow along with the behind-the-scenes stories of the game industry, then you’re well aware that Zynga has been in a nasty downward spiral recently. Just flip through this list of headlines over at TechCrunch and it’s pretty much all bad news.
Earlier today, TechCrunch reported that Zynga will be shutting down the OMGPOP.com website, which served as the humble beginnings for the studio that would go on to create the popular Pictionary-like app Draw Something. Zynga bought OMGPOP and the Draw Something IP for around $200 million in March of last year, but with their recent downturn they’ve laid off nearly the entire OMGPOP staff as they race to trim the fat around their company.
In a follow-up report, sources tell TechCrunch that members of the OMGPOP team were in talks with Zynga to buy back the actual website, games and IP that lives on OMGPOP.com, even if that didn’t include the mega-successful Draw Something IP, but that Zynga has refused to sell any of it due to the amount of legal red tape it would take to do such a thing.
The actual shut-down date for OMGPOP.com is September 30th, though a handful of the playable games on the site are closing earlier, at the end of August. Draw Something, Draw Something 2 and the original that inspired both Draw My Thing will continue running for the time being, however.
We haven’t really been covering much of Zynga’s woes recently, as we’d rather point you towards some cool games you could be playing rather than detail a huge company’s flaming out, but we’ve all enjoyed Draw Something so much over the past year and a half that it’s sad to see the final nail in the coffin of the studio that brought it to us.
