OMGPop

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

~ the obit ~

the first time i heard the name omgpop was mid-2012, when draw something was briefly everywhere. i was twenty eight, working as an engineer in ankara, and someone at the office was drawing "hamburger" with a finger on their phone while the other guy tried to guess in a rush. that was the peak. it did not last long enough for a second wave.

omgpop was a small new york flash game studio founded in 2006, run out of soho by charles forman with dan porter as ceo. they had a batch of thirty or so browser and facebook games that never quite broke through: balloono and letterpop and a dozen quiet others. time magazine put them on a "50 best websites" list in 2009. the studio needed a hit. they got one, once.

draw something launched february 2012. within six weeks it had thirty five million downloads and 10.8 million daily active users on facebook, briefly passing zynga's own words with friends. zynga bought the whole studio on march 21, 2012 for one hundred and eighty million dollars, with roughly thirty million on top as employee retention. the reported total ran to about two hundred and ten million.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the collapse ~

draw something's daily active users peaked in march 2012 and then dropped by half within two months. by summer the game had lost most of its user base. zynga's own stock, which had already been sliding, took the omgpop deal as the moment "acquisitions might not save this" became conventional wisdom on the street.

zynga restructured in june 2013 and laid off eighteen percent of staff. the new york office where omgpop lived was on the list. four of the studio's games were formally pulled on 29 august 2013. the omgpop.com portal itself went dark on 30 september 2013, eighteen months after the acquisition closed.

~ the funny part ~

draw something the game was not on the shutdown list at that point. zynga kept the app running under its own name for years, with sequels and rebrands, before finally winding down draw something classic on 6 january 2022. by then the branding had long stopped mentioning omgpop.

what got closed in september 2013 was the portal and the studio, not the one game that had briefly justified the whole thing. the small games that were the actual studio's back catalog all disappeared with the site.

~ what survived ~

a case study for anyone raising money in a viral spike. the timing of the zynga sale looked genius for a week and looked catastrophic within a quarter. draw something had spent eighteen months as the fastest-growing casual game on facebook and was gone as a cultural moment by christmas 2012. the studio behind it was gone by christmas 2013.

charles forman left the industry for a while. dan porter went on to teamwhistle. zynga eventually got bought by take-two. the deal remains the reference point people cite whenever a mobile game jumps from zero to fifty million downloads and someone gets ready to write a big check.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »