So my sister-in-law got me hooked on Draw Something like three weeks ago and I have genuinely lost hours of my life to it. You know the game — somebody draws a terrible doodle, you guess the word, bonus points if you guess it fast. I am bad at drawing. My rendering of "hurricane" last week looked like a plate of spaghetti and my brother-in-law guessed it in four seconds anyway, which tells you something about how low the bar is.
Anyway, Zynga bought OMGPOP on Wednesday. The company that makes Draw Something. For something like $180 million, plus another $30 million set aside to keep the OMGPOP staff from bolting the second the check clears. Which, fair, that's basically standard practice at this point, but it still always reads a little grim when you see the retention bonus line item spelled out like that.
I dont really know how I feel about it honestly. Part of me is happy for those guys — OMGPOP had been kicking around since 2006 making stuff nobody used (anyone remember Snap It? no? exactly) and then Draw Something exploded and 35 million downloads later they're suddenly the hottest acquisition target in mobile gaming. Good for them, genuinely. But Zynga is the company that made FarmVille and then made six more FarmVille-shaped things and then bought Words With Friends and now this, and I cant shake the feeling that in about eight months Draw Something is going to be full of energy meters and a store where you buy extra "paint" with real money. Ive seen this movie before. Give it time.
The thing is the appeal of the game right now is exactly how dumb and low-stakes it is. No lives, no timers, no nagging. You draw a thing, your friend guesses it, you go about your day. The second Zynga's product team gets its hands on the guts of it I'd bet real money there's a monetization pass within two quarters. Maybe I'm wrong! I hope Im wrong. But Ive been burned by this exact pattern enough times to be cynical about it now.
In semi-related news I finally went and looked at the new iPad in person last weekend, the one with the retina screen that came out on the 16th. My buddy Dan has one and let me hold it in the Apple Store while the guy working there hovered nearby doing that thing where they pretend to straighten cables but are actually just watching you. The screen is stupid good, like distractingly good, text just looks printed rather than rendered. Apple apparently moved three million of these things in the first three days, which at $499 and up is an absurd number of dollars changing hands over a long weekend. I am not buying one. Mine's an iPad 2 and it does everything I need it to do and I refuse to be the guy who upgrades every single year, thats a losing game financially and I know myself well enough to know Id do it every year if I let myself start.
Also saw that Instagram is finally bringing an Android version, they said something about it at SXSW this week. Took them long enough, my brother's had an Android phone for over a year now and has been complaining about being locked out the whole time. Once that actually ships I assume half my feed's photo quality is about to nosedive, sorry in advance to everyone whose phone camera is worse than an iPhone 4S.
Anyway that's the roundup. Between the new tablet, the app acquisition, and Instagram finally expanding off iOS, feels like one of those weeks where three separate things all happened that'll probably matter more in hindsight than they seem to right now. Or maybe none of it matters and we'll all have forgotten Draw Something by August. Genuinely could go either way with these things, thats sort of the fun of watching it happen in real time instead of reading about it after the fact in some year-end wrap-up post.
Going to go lose another round to my brother-in-law now. He guessed "platypus" off what was objectively just a brown blob with legs. I dont know how he does it.