Zynga loses chief designer
By
Eddie Makuch, News Editor
Brian Reynolds out at social game company after nearly four years.
Zynga has lost a top developer. Chief game designer Brian Reynolds has left the social game company, he announced over Twitter last night. Reynolds had spent nearly four years with the San Francisco, California-based FarmVille developer.
It is not clear where Reynolds is headed next or if he will be replaced at Zynga.
Reynolds founded Zynga's Baltimore, Maryland studio, which released FrontierVille in June 2010. His principal game credits also include CityVille 2 and FrontierVille: Pioneer Trail.
Prior to joining Zynga in May 2009, Reynolds was a founder of Civilization studio Firaxis Games. He left Firaxis in late 1999 and founded Big Huge Games with three partners. At that company, he was lead designer on Rise of Nations and Rise of Legends, before negotiating a sale to THQ in January 2008.
It has been tough going at Zynga of late. The company enacted a major round of layoffs in October, has seen numerous top-level staff defections in the past year, and faces a high-profile lawsuit from Electronic Arts.
By
Eddie Makuch, News Editor
Eddie Makuch (Mack-ooh) is a News Editor at GameSpot. He works out of the company's Boston office in Somerville, Mass., and loves extra chunky peanut butter.
39 comments
They are a complete rubbish company that shoves out crap and doesnt fix them they like an EA for the phone app market nothing ever works from them and if it does it usually has network issues and you cant continue. I hope they shut down soon completely
Good, I hope Zynga dies in a fire... the way they treat their employees is as bad as they shameless way they rip off other games so blatantly.
4 Like What does a "chief designer" even do at Zynga? They certainly don't design new games.
"Chief of Rip-Offs" might not be as good a job title though I guess.
@soulless4now ...Won't be long now, sounds like they're gonna' be getting their's soon enough.
@tgwolf @soulless4now I wouldn't be surprised if they closed their doors sometime this summer.
Do you hear that Zynga?.........
................
That is the sound of Innevitability....................
Your lucrative bubble is about to burst!
2 Like I remember when Zynga was on top of the world and thinking how stupid that was. When will people learn that social gamers are incredibly fickle? Have a division cater to them. Don't make a whole company that does that. Can't say I'd be surprised if the whole company collapsed, but that's what you get for devoting yourself to easily made games for an audience that will inevitably lose interest.
2 Like Since when is copy-paste game design? even i could do that,
All they do is slap a new name on it, add a spam youre friends and a microtransaction system on it.
2 Like @gatsbythepig BAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAAHAH.... WAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHHAHAHAHAHAHAA ROFL BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.....oh wait you were seroius?
@xeoneex66 @gatsbythepigI forgot to wrote jk or /end sarcasm.
I figured no one would really think anyone would write that seriously.
@gatsbythepig @xeoneex66 I know what you meant sir :D. It is all good and I had fun writing that. I have never touched a Zynga game, and I KNOW they are crap.
Serves them right and I do like anonymous's efforts to give them a little reailty check.
2 Like So that's where Brian Reynolds been hiding for the last couple of years. Brilliant game designer. Civ II, Alpha Centauri and Rise of Nations are all fantastic games that he was involved in. Hopefully he's now free to go back to designing real games. Maybe there's a spot open at Firaxis, would be awesome.
It's funny how people are ignoring this amazing history in game design and are mocking him for the title of chief game designer. It's like they think his history in game design started and ended at Zynga...
4 Like The sooner Zynga ends up in the dust bin of history the better off the industry is.
Oh no however will they look at other peoples work and say "we could add micro transactions to that" now.
1 Like Chief Designer? Do these people really need any creative power? All they do is copy the games of other developers anyway
Has there ever been such a meteoric rise followed by such a quick fall from grace? I hope this is a lesson to investors looking for that next videogame trend. These casual games are largely short term fads with no long term prospects. Angry Birds might be the only exception I can think of and even its popularity is probably going to wane.
1 Like @Stonecutters908 I don't think it's fair to hate on casual games. While each individual game might be short lived, I doubt the trend of growth of the genre is. And, what difference does it make if people who might not consider themselves gamers spend their time tending a fake farm? In some cases, those people might discover what we might consider more traditional games through this vector, which increases the customer base, which puts more value in the industry, which can lead to a stronger, more resilient gaming industry.
@Overeduk8ed @Stonecutters908 Who's hating? It is just an acknowledgement of reality. Farmville and its many clones don't retain the user base that Zynga and their many investors hoped it would. The rest of the casual industry is basically down to mobile, which I have no problem with but the reality of that space is that a developer can't charge more than $1 or the game generally doesn't sell and for every Angry Birds there are 1000 games that go no where.
@Ledah Usually such a justifiably rapid fall from grace is predicated by the arrival of a super-hero or at least a well-armed protagonist. Clearly the Zynga story will not make a good comic book adaptation.
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