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.
Clumsy Ninja bounces on a trampoline.
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.
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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.
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