The Facebook-based game publisher Zynga has yet to launch its public stock offering but the privately owned company still has to release financial info before the IPO launches. Today the Wall Street Journal reports that for the quarter that ended on June 30, Zynga announced that its profits went down to just $1.3 million, a massive 95 percent drop compared to profits of $27.2 million that the company recorded at the same time period a year ago. The company recorded overall revenues of $279.1 million for the quarter. While that number is double the amount it received at the same time a year ago, it"s also a much lower amount of growth compared to Zynga"s previous financial quarters.
Zynga also admitted that the daily amount of players for its various games, including Cityville, Farmville and others, went down to 59 million users in its last quarter, compared to 62 million users from the previous quarter. Zynga blamed the lower profits and smaller player base on the fact that the company didn"t launch any new games in the first half of 2011. Since then the company launched the strategy game Empires and Allies and the quest-based game Adventure World. Earlier this week it announced plans to launch Mafia Wars 2, the sequel to one of its longest running Facebook games, later this fall.
Zynga is still expected to launch its IPO by the end of 2011. The stock launch is expected to raise $1 billion for Zynga and give the company a market value of about $20 billion.