If we didn’t feel we could properly support and invest in rebuilding the game for fans of YoWorld, we wouldn’t have acquired the game. Do we have the team to successfully grow the game? No matter the opportunity, if there isn’t a strong team in place to actually grow the game, then the opportunity can be easily squandered.For us, seeing the outpouring of fans reaching out to us to save their game gave us reassurances that they would continue to support us if we were able to acquire it. Are there passionate fans? A game may get a million players, but ten thousand loyal fans is an audience you can build an entire business around.There were three factors we considered before pulling the trigger on the YoWorld acquisition: It’s no secret: games are sunset for a reason, and it is a huge risk for a gaming studio to take on a title that is being discarded unless there are strong indicators that the game could potentially be made successful once again. They got our attention, and before we knew it, we were in talks with Zynga about possibly buying the game back from them.
However, YoWorld still had a lot of daily players at the time of the announcement, and their community got our attention by vocalizing their protests over the announced closure of the game. Six years later-with YoWorld declining in revenues and daily active users-Zynga decided to shut down the game. At that point, YoWorld was generating more than 100,000 new installs every single day with virtually zero dollars spent on marketing. In 2008, during the Facebook social games craze, Greg Thomson (CPO and co-founder of Big Viking Games) decided to sell his game, YoVille (now YoWorld) to Zynga.
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