Draw Something

» see omgpop.com/drawsomething as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

draw something landed in early 2012 with a real moment, then deflated faster than any consumer app of its scale before it. the picture-of-stick-figures screenshots showed up in my facebook feed for about a month, then nothing. i never installed it. the few people i knew who did stopped opening it inside three or four weeks, which turned out to be the standard arc for everyone.

omgpop had spent years as a new york startup founded as iminlikewithyou by dan porter and charles forman, cycling through dozens of casual web games with no hit big enough to matter. the company had pivoted multiple times. by late 2011 it was nearly out of runway. draw something was the next-game-or-die attempt. dan porter pitched the team on a turn-based pictionary clone where one player drew a word with their finger on a phone screen and another player guessed letter by letter from a tile rack.

the app launched on ios and android on february 6 2012. inside the first week it was the top free app in the us app store. inside three weeks it was the top free app in dozens of countries. inside five weeks total downloads had crossed 50 million, which was the fastest any mobile application had ever reached that mark. peak daily active users were 15 million by the third week of march, and the company's revenue from the in-app purchase of extra word categories was running about a quarter million dollars a day.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

this part you had to be in the english-speaking app store charts for, and i was at the edge of it. the appeal was the asynchronous turn-based shape, like words with friends but with drawing instead of letters. you would send a finished drawing to a friend who would open it whenever and watch the playback. anyway, that small social loop of waiting for your friend's drawing to come back was the hook. once you played it with three or four friends the daily session count went up fast.

the cultural moment had two pieces. one was the gameplay itself, which produced an endless stream of stick-figure drawings of celebrities and band names that looked great as screenshots. the other was the speed of the growth curve, which turned the app into a business-press story about how fast consumer mobile could now move. dan porter went on a press tour for most of march 2012 with the same downloads-per-day chart in his hand at every interview.

~ the day it died ~

zynga bought omgpop on march 21 2012 for $180 million in cash. mark pincus had spent the prior six months losing the bid for popcap to electronic arts and had decided not to lose the next mobile breakout. the deal closed inside about three weeks of negotiation, which was unusually fast for a transaction at that size. omgpop's roughly forty employees got a closing-night party at the new york office where dan porter played the song "fxxk you" by cee lo green over the speakers.

the deflation started inside thirty days of the close. by may 2012 daily active users had fallen from 15 million to 10 million. by june they were below 5 million. the retention curve was unusually steep because the gameplay loop did not produce enough variation to keep people interested past the first dozen sessions. zynga laid off most of omgpop in june 2013, fifteen months after the acquisition. draw something 2 launched april 2013 to thin reception and shut down 2018. the original brand stayed nominally live as a back-catalog title until december 15 2022, when zynga finally shut both versions off.

~ what replaced it ~

draw something became the case study every mobile-gaming presentation cited for the next five years as the example of a viral app that did not retain. the $180 million zynga paid was the rough size of the omgpop revenue stream at peak, projected forward on the assumption that daily active users would stay roughly flat. they did not. the asset zynga had bought was a brand that had already passed its commercial peak by the closing date.

dan porter left zynga in 2013 to run digital at william morris endeavor and later founded overtime, the mobile sports media company. charles forman cashed out and disappeared from the new york startup orbit. the omgpop nyc office shut down. the broader takeaway in the mobile-gaming community was that draw something had broken the assumption that download velocity translated to long-term value, which then reshaped how the next generation of casual-mobile companies were valued in early-stage funding rounds.

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