I admit it: I'm a Zynga addict. The social strategy game Empires & Allies has me so hooked that I've pretty much sworn off requests to play sister games such as CityVille for fear I'll have even less of a life than I do now.
Lately, these concerns are fading -- not because of the pull of Zynga's aggressive marketing but because of outages. E&A has run remarkably slow this week, possibly because of ongoing trouble with Amazon.com's
All of the company's games appear to have been affected. Separately, some FrontierVille players saw their games roll back over the weekend, eliminating progress they'd made in days prior. Zynga's games may be tempting, but my life is way too busy to wait around for wheezing servers to catch a digital breath.
All this comes as The Associated Press is reporting that eight proposed public offerings have been pulled -- spooked by Mr. Market's lunatic flailing. Groupon and Zynga could survive the turmoil and still get to an IPO, but if the daily-deal specialist's recent results are any indicator, competition is taking a toll.
Zynga has its own troubles with rivals. Google
Competition. Outages. Market panic. Zynga is one of the best-positioned businesses I've ever seen, but the combination of these factors has even me worrying about buying into this IPO. The negatives are beginning to outweigh the positives.
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