OMGPOP Draws Zynga's Daily User Traffic Up By 25%
As the dust settles after Zynga's purchase of New York mobile social game developer OMGPOP, the company is visibly taking on a new shape. A 25% larger and more mobile one. That's the percentage growth of its total daily active user base …
Context & Ripple Effects
The arc here is fast: TechCrunch reported Zynga was in talks for OMGPOP only on March 19, the deal was welcomed on the Zynga blog two days later, and a March 23 S-1 filing put the price at $180M while revealing Mark Pincus would sell 15 percent of his stake in a secondary offering. Two weeks after that welcome post brought OMGPOP into the family, the first hard number has landed: total daily active users up 25 percent.
That matters because the deal was always a bet that Draw Something's viral mobile audience could be absorbed rather than just admired — and because Zynga had already confirmed a strategic shift beyond Facebook as its primary distribution platform. The 25% jump, coming largely from mobile, is early evidence the acquisition is doing exactly what it was priced to do: rebalance Zynga's user base toward phones.
First-order effects
- Zynga's total daily active user base grows 25 percent within roughly two weeks of closing, an immediate user-count payoff on the $180M outlay disclosed in its S-1 filing.
- OMGPOP's New York team folds into Zynga, though integration PR took a hit when OMGPOP's CEO publicly tweeted that the one employee not transitioning was the 'weakest,' drawing criticism at exactly the moment Zynga needs the studio's talent to stay.
Second-order effects
- Rivals in mobile social gaming now face a Zynga whose growth engine runs on phone-native virality rather than Facebook channels, forcing them to compete for the same hit-chasing acquisitions instead of building audiences organically.
- With Pincus selling 15 percent of his shares into a secondary offering just as user numbers spike, public-market investors get their first test of whether Draw Something's audience converts into durable monetization — or whether Zynga paid $180M for a fad's peak.
Third-order effects
- If acquired hits keep driving reported user metrics more than internal development does, social gaming consolidates into a market where valuations are set by the last viral chart-topper — raising the stakes on every future studio bid.
- A materially more mobile Zynga weakens Facebook's hold over the company's distribution economics, accelerating the broader decoupling of social-game developers from any single platform.
The trend: Social gaming is consolidating around big acquirers buying viral mobile hits outright, and Zynga's 25% DAU bump shows those purchases can instantly reweight a company toward mobile — with the open question being whether such audiences persist past the fad.