Don Mattrick and Mark Pincus pose for when Mattrick was named Zynga's CEO in 2013.
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Big Zynga shakeup leaves founder Mark Pincus out of day-to-day operations

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 2 min

Zynga founder Mark Pincus is stepping down from an operational role at the huge social game publisher as his successor, CEO Don Mattrick, puts his own stamp on the company.

Pincus will give up his title of chief product officer, stepping away from day-to-day management, but he will remain chairman of the company that he founded almost seven years ago. Mattrick is taking on more responsibility and appointing more executives with extensive video game experience as part of an ongoing effort to turn around the $1 billion company’s growth in the multibillion-dollar casual- and social-game sectors.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.