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David Ko puts up the ‘guard rails’ at Zynga to keep costs under control (interview)

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 7 min

david ko

David Ko’s job is to get Zynga into fighting shape. The chief operations officer of Zynga is No. 2 in command next to chief executive Mark Pincus, and Ko has made some tough calls, like the announced closing of CityVille 2, The Friend Game, and Party Place. In a conference call with analysts on Tuesday, he described this process as “putting up guard rails” so that managers can pull the plug on games that aren’t working earlier.

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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.