geekosystem

Zynga isn't doing so well these days. Their quarterly performance has been abysmal of late, and they've just announced that they'll be writing off between $85 and $95 million in association with the acquisition of OMGPOP. Considering that Zynga shelled out between $180 and $210 million for the company, that's a rather massive nosedive. What goes up must come down, after all, and Draw Something didn't have much of a revenue model. Looks like the Zynga is finding that out the hard way.

Researchers at Brown University have developed a computer program that can recognize rough sketches, and may one day prove a capable -- or even too capable -- digital opponent for human players in games like Pictionary and Draw Something. While it might sound a little silly, this is actually a pretty big step for computing. As we've mentioned elsewhere on the site, as smart as computers are at raw processing, they are about that dumb at abstract reasoning, and there's no reasoning more abstract than trying to figure out what the hell someone is frantically scrawling on a pad of paper from across the room. Is that a foot? Shoe? Wait, now there's a flower coming out of it?

Draw Something player Michael took the game to a whole other level by creating the Ignore Hitler Tumblr, a site that features very elaborate pictures of Adolf Hitler in Draw Something, even if the word for that round has nothing to do with Hitler. When asked why he includes Hitler in his Draw Something drawings, he simply replied, "He was the king of dicks. I'm not trying to make any political point by doing it, but I think anything that reduces a genocidal prick to an acceptable figure of mockery is a good thing." We think it's a good thing too, as the Tumblr is pretty amusing. Check out a handful of choice Draw Something drawings that feature Hitler for no reason after the break.

It's a tale as old as time. Or at the very least, as old as the Apple App Store. Whenever an incredibly successful application manages to hold the top of the chart, Zynga chases them until they own the company responsible or have made their own watered-down clone. In the case of OMGPOP's Draw Something, however, this may have turned out to be a grievous mistake.

iOS game developer OMGPOP recently rose to prominence with its mobile hit Draw Something, a Pictionary-like play-by-email-esque game. Though Zynga obviously didn't invent the play-by-email mechanic, one of the most popular mobile games, Words With Friends, is both a Zynga property and probably introduced the mechanic to a whole new demographic. So, it seems like a fit that the developer of Draw Something, a game that is basically "Words With Friends but drawing," just got acquired by Zynga.