Zynga had a rather bad year 2012. The share price dropped by over 80%, there were several rounds of layoffs, and at the end of the year they had to suddenly shut down over a dozen games. As Zynga isn't exactly a popular company, having a reputation for ripping off other games and causing a lot of people to spam each other on Facebook, those bad news were generally greeted with Schadenfreude. But of course for the millions of people who play Zynga games all of this isn't quite so funny. Just remember how upset the players of City of Heroes were when their game shut down; don't think that is any different if the game that shuts down is PetVille.

I'm still trying to keep up to date with games on many different platforms, including Facebook, so while waiting for the new Sim City to come out I was trying Zynga's new CityVille 2. That gave me some first hand experience of the trouble Zynga is in, because CityVille 2 is a buggy mess. It appears that Zynga made their games graphically more appealing, but that caused some technical troubles. In a game which revolves around requesting items from your neighbors, bugs that make requests to neighbors not go through are quite noticeable. And then suddenly my city got rolled back by a week. Zynga posted a warning on top of the screen: "CityVille 2 is experiencing rollback issues. Sorry if your City lost progress!" but obviously "sorry" doesn't cut it. I decided CityVille 2 isn't worth my time, and if that is an example of the quality of Zynga games, they'll have a hard time to save the company in 2013.

Guess I'll have to look for another city building game while waiting for Sim City. I hear Megapolis on the iPad is good.