Over 
the past year, no tech company has had ups and downs quite like Zynga.
In the days leading up to its debut on Wall Street last December, the social game kingpin was heralded as The Next Big Thing, an unstoppable force in an evolving industry, with proponents pointing to the enduring draw of games like Farmville, Mafia Wars, and Words With Friends. Lately, though, the company’s stock has taken a brutal beatdown and those proponents have changed their tune.
Doodling 
on your iPhone could lead to big money and big prizes.
CBS is developing a primetime game show based on Zynga’s popular Draw Something app. The network won a bidding war for the rights to the game and is reportedly fast-tracking the show as a possible mid-season replacement to step in when one of its new series ultimately fails.
Zynga 
raised eyebrows with its $210 million acquisition of OMGPOP, and CEO Mark Pincus said there’s more high-dollar buyouts to come. Gamasutra editor-at-large Chris Morris examines the spending frenzy.
Just under a month ago, the games world gasped when Zynga spent $180 million for Draw Something developer OMGPOP (plus a reported $30 million in employee retention payments). While the game was dominating the app store charts, that was still a shocking amount for a company with just one hit.
It turns out, though, that may have been just the beginning. In an interview with Bloomberg this week, Zynga CEO Mark Pincus said he’s hoping to do “a few” more deals for that amount or higher. And that’s when the klaxons in people’s heads should have started sounding.
Chris Morris: Journalist 