Earlier this year, Zynga founder and then-CEO Mark Pincus confirmed to investors that they had 10 new mobile games planned before the end of 2016. The most surprising of these? A new CityVille designed from the ground up for mobile. …
Earlier this year, Zynga founder and then-CEO Mark Pincus confirmed to investors that they had 10 new mobile games planned before the end of 2016. The most surprising of these? A new CityVille designed from the ground up for mobile.
What a difference a few months can make.
In their Q2 earnings call earlier this week, current Zynga CEO Frank Gibeau described a future where the company will be doing “more with less.” Those three little words, if said quickly enough, make precisely the same sound as an axe falling. Poor CityVille.
From Gibeau’s statement:
[quote]We continue to focus on quality over quantity in terms of our new titles. As a result, we have decided to stop development of our current version of CityVille mobile, which was originally scheduled to launch later this year. Based on extensive testing and soft-launch data, the game failed to meet our expectations and those of our players. As a company, we remain committed to the Invest Express category and our CityVille brand long-term.[/quote]
On the upside, this doesn’t sound like a death knell for the CityVille brand. And if the game wasn’t up to the standards they needed it to be, maybe this is a blessing in disguise. Either way, we’ll keep our fingers crossed for more CV in the future — and hopefully get a chance to play Dawn of Titans while we wait, which is now slated for Q4 2016.
