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He had a track record of success at EA and Microsoft, establishing the Madden NFL and NHL franchises in the '90s at Tiburon, overseeing worldwide publishing and Xbox Live software during the height of the Xbox 360 era, and returning to EA as COO after that. Schappert's demotion was a surprise even with the company underperformance and the suit. Zynga CEO Marc Pincus was also named, having sold $200 million of stock. Schappert was one of the executives named in the suit, having sold $3.9 million worth of stock.
If it was related to Schappert's performance, Zynga surely knew about that when it released its numbers.īut Zynga might not have expected such a large drop in its stock price, or the resulting insider trading suit. The timing was odd, as such shifts would ordinarily be made alongside the earnings. The second hit came just days later, when an investor filed a class-action suit accusing Zynga executives of insider trading, saying they knew the company's outlook was going to take a hit when they unloaded hundreds of millions of dollars of stock earlier in the year.įinally, Zynga ended July by demoting chief operating officer John Schappert. Not even the earnings call news that the company was getting into real-money gambling could spark optimism around its financial fortunes. So when Zynga's second financial report since its IPO fell far short of expectations, a sell-off of company stock dropped the price below $3.33, less than one-third of what it initially traded for the previous December. This industry will forgive a lot if you're making money – hello, Activision Blizzard board of directors – but no profit margin means no margin for error. But the sentiment around the company got notably worse starting with a handful of developments in the last week of July.įirst (and, if we're being honest, foremost), the company stumbled financially.
It was already in a precarious spot, suffering from a deflating Facebook social gaming bubble and struggling to build up much of a presence in mobile gaming to offset those losses. Zynga always had its detractors, being a poster child for the social gaming boom that some traditional developers and players found derivative, exploitive, or just plain evil.īut a decade ago, the social gaming giant had become a punching bag for essentially anyone and everyone.