Zynga drops amid worries about Facebook gaming

Shares of Zynga Inc. dropped to their lowest level since the online game company’s December initial public stock offering amid growing concerns about its ability to attract new users and keep old ones.

THE SPARK: Cowen and Co. analyst Doug Creutz said that the number of daily active users of Zynga‘s Facebook games declined by 8 percent in May. That’s the second consecutive significant month-to-month drop, Creutz said, with “nearly all of the company’s major titles declining significantly.”

Creutz was citing figures from AppData, which tracks Facebook games and apps. Zynga could not immediately be reached for comment Tuesday afternoon.

BACKGROUND: Though Zynga has been expanding into mobile games — it owns popular titles such as “Draw Something” and “Words With Friends” — it still derives more than 90 percent of its revenue from games played on Facebook.

ANALYSIS: Cowen said he thought consumers were “switching decisively” to mobile games from Facebook games. While Zynga is “aggressively pursuing” mobile games, it still relies mostly on the Facebook platform.

And on phones, Zynga’s casual games came in behind more serious multiplayer and role-playing games, according to Creutz’s analysis. He said the top-grossing mobile game on the iPhone last month was “Kingdoms of Camelot: Battle for the North,” a multiplayer strategy game, and on Android devices a role-playing card game called “Rage of Bahamut.”

SHARE ACTION: Shares of Zynga, which is based in San Francisco, fell 57 cents, or 10 percent, to $4.98 in afternoon trading. Earlier, the stock sank as low as $4.78, more than 50 percent off its IPO price of $10. The shares had traded as high as $15.91 in March.

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