Bloomberg is reporting that former Microsoft executive Don Mattrick has jumped ship and joined social-gaming developer Zynga as new CEO. This became more apparent as company emails and posts started swirling around the web. Whatever this really means, we hope it’s not a sign of up a coming graphic intensive Farmville gaming culture.
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Don Mattrick is generally known for his role in bringing about the Xbox 360, Xbox One and Xbox Live. He also played a massive part in successful franchises like FIFA, Need for Speed and Sims while he worked for EA games. More recently, however, he’s become known for his rather snotty remarks concerning some of the Xbox One’s connectivity restrictions.
He was reported for notoriously saying that you should “stick with the Xbox 360 if you have zero access to the internet, that is an offline device.” This together with other restriction issues of the upcoming Xbox One and general re-shaping of Microsoft may have a massive role to play with Matrrick’s departure.
Now the ship Mattrick recently boarded is most famous for its social games like Farmville, HoldEm Poker (now called Zynga Poker) and Mafia Wars. Assuming some of you are (most likely were) within the millions ballpark of users who have played this ridiculous and addictive Facebook games, you’re probably aware that the company has since been doing quite poorly.
Considering its first wave of success in entering the gaming market when Facebook was at its peak, Zynga has been struggling with controversies such as spam allegations and other developers calling out intellectual property theft. These issues alone won’t bring the entire business to ruins however. Right after the rise of Facebook’s social games came the massive present success of mobile games. This is something Zynga couldn’t keep up with. Quality games came out top and users went mobile.
In an email to Zynga staff members, founder of Zynga Mark Pincus said that Mattrick’s “one of the top executives in the overall entertainment business and he’s a great coach who has inspired people to do their best work and build strong, productive teams.”
All-in-all, this type of task of building up a stronger business might be a nice challenge for an experienced someone like Mattrick. As Reuters reports Zynga’s company shares already went up a massive 13 percent since the news was broken today.
For the time being there’s been no exact words of what’s happening with the open position at Microsoft. Though Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says that Mattrick’s former team will report to him now. In another ,email Ballmer illustrates his respect and no hard feelings towards Mattrick’s departure:
“Since joining IEB more than six years ago, Don and his team have accomplished much. Xbox Live members grew from 6 million to 48 million. Xbox 360 became the No. 1 selling console in North America the past two years. We introduced Kinect and have sold more than 24 million sensors. We released fantastic games, and, most importantly, we expanded Xbox to go beyond great gaming to deliver all the entertainment people want — sports, music, movies, live television and much more.”
Then hoping to round off all these public posts, Don Mattrick himself posted his exciting news of joining the Zynga staff team:
“I joined Zynga because I believe that Mark’s pioneering vision and mission to connect the world through games is just getting started. As Mark was recruiting me to come here, I was impressed by his creativity, drive and the clarity in which he sees the future of games and entertainment as a core consumer experience.”
