The DeanBeat: Zynga’s new strategy reveals the agony and the ecstasy of mobile games

Zynga’s new strategy from chief executive Don Mattrick shows that the future of games is mobile. Zynga paid $527 million for mobile game maker NaturalMotion. And Mattrick said that 75 percent of all new games are now debuting on mobile first.

My lesson from this big transaction is that there is a growing divide between the people who make it look so easy to make successful mobile games and the people who find it incredibly hard to replicate success. Zynga has been in the latter group, and it desperately wants to graduate to the former, as mobile is the fastest growing game market at $13.2 billion worldwide, according to Gartner.