OMGPOP parties after company closure

The news out of Zynga the past few days has been pretty grim. Their strategy to turn the company towards gambling hasn’t paid off. They just laid off 18% of their workforce. They wound up closing down OMGPOP, the company they paid $180 million for barely a year ago largely based on the success of Draw Something.

On June 3rd, OMGPOP employees were called into a suprise mid-day meeting with HR and given the bad news. According to ex-employees speaking to Business Insider, the closure was cause for celebration.

“Most layoffs are sad. You imagine big corporate settings where security is there to lead people out of the office so they don’t make a scene. This was the opposite,” says the former employee. “Music was being played loudly, and people were ripping up Zynga hoodies and T-shirts. Anything that was Zynga was completely left there. The sentiment felt positive.”

Few of the ex-OMGPOP staff had any regrets. Meanwhile, Zynga is now projecting quarterly net losses of between $39 million and $28.5 million.