You have to hand it to Don Mattrick, the chief executive of Zynga. He’s thorough. Since he arrived in July, Mattrick has turned over the entire senior management team at Zynga.
Travis Boatman, formerly of Zynga
Although he still works for founder Mark Pincus, Zynga’s chairman, Mattrick has carté blanche to do what it takes to make the social-gaming company successful. It’s encouraging to see that he has the authority and will to appoint whomever he sees fit to do the job. On the other hand, new departures indicate that things have not settled down at Zynga, which has seen its headcount shrink from more than 3,500 a couple of years ago to about 1,991 as of the end of the first quarter.
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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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