Zynga pins hopes on ad revenue potential and high-end Dawn of Titans strategy game

Zynga beat Wall Street’s estimates for bookings for its fourth quarter, and it also announced 10 games that will launch in 2016. But its stock price fell in after-hours trading, partly because of a weak outlook for the first quarter and falling overall user numbers.

As we noted in our earlier earnings story, the quarterly earnings highlight Zynga’s fundamental challenge of elbowing competitors out of the way in the $34 billion mobile game market, as its audience on Facebook desktop dwindles. The company is showing signs that it’s stabilized its most valuable games, and it is making money from its core users. But the overall number of users is down, and Zynga knows it needs to ship some new big games to offset those declines.