Why Zynga’s smiling on Dawn of Titans after killing Mafia Wars

Earlier this month, social game developer Zynga shut down Mafia Wars, the mobile reboot of the original web game that soft-launched back in April. In a call today with GamesBeat, CEO Frank Gibeau says that the reason was because it wasn’t meeting performance expectations. On the other hand, the publisher is continuing its commitment to the mobile action strategy title Dawn of Titans, which despite great player reviews is still somewhat middling in the Apple App Store and Google Play charts.

“One of the benefits of the mobile business is that if you put a game out like of Dawn of Titans that’s high quality, that has intellectual property that’s really interesting and compelling but it doesn’t quite find an audience or it doesn’t quite have a feature set that really sparks to create an audience — in mobile you can take the time to keep innovating on the game, to keep building on the game until you get it to a place where it does find that audience and it does pop,” said Gibeau.