Daily Archives: 2022-01-10

Article note: Because Zynga are ruthless whale hunters that make Rovio look principled and ethical, and freemium mobile shit is proving to be the optimal way to turn entertainment products into profits.

Enlarge / The company that publishes Grand Theft Auto now owns all of these goofballs, too... (credit: Zynga)

Major console game publisher Take-Two has acquired social and mobile gaming giant Zynga for a whopping $12.7 billion in cash and stock, making the deal the largest acquisition of a single gaming company in history.

That might seem like a ludicrous price if your familiarity with Zynga is limited to FarmVille, CityVille, and other Zynga games that came to dominate the "social gaming" fad of the early 2010s (and led to the creation of some excellent books, if I do say so myself). But while the original FarmVille merely limped along until 2010, Zynga has successfully transitioned into a casual mobile gaming powerhouse by spending billions of dollars on acquisitions like Gram Games (1010) and Small Giant Games (Empire & Puzzles) in 2018, as well as Peak Games (Toon Blast) and Rollic (Go Knots 3D) in 2020. Last year, the company even dipped into PC games with the acquisition of Torchlight studio Echtra Games.

With those companies gathered under the Zynga umbrella, the company now attracts over 168 million monthly users and made $706 million in revenue in the latest reporting quarter.

Article note: Oof, I expected the "Everything about the node ecosystem is dumb" and "I realized I've been enabling profit-seeking parasites and objected" parts of the story. I'm not even super shocked by the the oddly placed but (only in the broad sense, not the specifics) vaguely reasonable middle-fingers-up-for-Aaron connection. But then it veers in a whole new crazy Qnut flavored direction that wasn't even an option until a few years ago.

Enlarge (credit: James Brey / iStockPhoto / Getty Images)

The developer who sabotaged two of his own open source code libraries, causing disruptions for thousands of apps that used them, has a colorful past that includes embracing a QAnon theory involving Aaron Swartz, the well-known hacktivist and programmer who died by suicide in 2013.

Marak Squires, the author of two JavaScript libraries with more than 21,000 dependent apps and more than 22 million weekly downloads, updated his projects late last week after they remained unchanged for more than a year. The updates contained code to produce an infinite loop that caused dependent apps to spew gibberish, prefaced by the words “Liberty Liberty Liberty.” The update sent developers scrambling as they attempted to fix their malfunctioning apps.

What really happened with Aaron Swartz?

Squires provided no reason for the move, but in a readme file accompanying last week’s malicious update, he included the words “What really happened with Aaron Swartz?”