Zynga CEO Don Mattrick recently announced he would step down from his position. In his place, founder Mark Pincus will return as the company’s CEO in an effort to steer the struggling company in a more successful direction.

But as the mobile gaming industry gets more lucrative — and more crowded — Zynga’s round robin of CEOs reflects a panicked company fighting to stay relevant.

Zynga gained fame with FarmVille, a Facebook-integrated game that far too many of us were spammed with notifications to join. With Pincus at the helm of the company, Facebook games like Words with Friends and Draw Something launched Zynga’s name to the top of the gaming industry. Seeing room to grow in the industry, Pincus opened Zynga for public trading and raised $1 billion.

For a long time, Zynga was able to exploit Facebook’s large user base with its games. But in 2011 and 2012, online users abandoned Facebook’s gaming platform for applications on their Android and iPhone devices.

Zynga developed mobile versions of Words with Friends and Draw Something, but the wide variety of free mobile games with exciting narratives made it hard for Zynga to hold users. As a result, the company lost more than $600 million, and its stock prices sank by 70 percent. Pincus stepped aside so Microsoft executive Don Mattrick, a more experienced and business-savvy leader, could try to take Zynga mobile.

While in charge, Mattrick took a machete to the company: laying off workers, cutting costs and shifting the company’s focus to games designed for smartphones and tablets. He spent half a million dollars on British software company NaturalMotion, hoping that the investment would give Zynga the resources to produce high quality mobile games.

But as the number of mobile gamers multiplied, so did the number of companies eager to carve out a spot in the industry. Companies dedicated solely to mobile game development created apps with more advanced storylines and social capabilities. With more entertaining options, users abandoned the repetitive board-game like apps from Zynga in favor of Game of War and Clash of Clans, which were made by Machine Zone and Supercell respectively.

Zynga only has itself to blame. Investment bank Digi-Capital said mobile games and online games could be worth more than $60 billion by 2017 and make up 60 percent of the entire gaming industry.

If you need any proof that this is the case, look no further than the advertising efforts for Game of War. Do you remember the bizarre but seemingly ubiquitous TV ads featuring Kate Upton in Middle Ages-like settings? Machine Zone paid $80 million on those advertisements, placing them in the Super Bowl and other high profile sporting events.

While that seems like a lot of money for a company who doesn’t charge for Game of War, the company claims to make $1.2 million a day. This is because of the volume of users and the “freemium” model employed by most free games now. An estimated 2.4 million users play Game of War, which means 2.4 million opportunities to sell in-game premium bonuses.

The industry is even calling traditional gaming companies to battle. Nintendo is partnering with DeNA Corp, a leading Japanese mobile games developer, to try and bring classic Nintendo characters to iPhones and Androids everywhere.

At the news of Pincus’s return, Zynga shares fell an astonishing 15 percent. Pincus has a lot of work to do, but his first step might be answering all the investors who doubt his ability to fix the sinking ship. Otherwise it might be game over for Zynga.

Brian Cheung is a senior broadcast and digital journalism and finance dual major. His column appears weekly. He can be reached at bkcheung@syr.edu and followed on Twitter @bcheungz.

Published on April 12, 2015 at 10:14 pm