What if you bought Zynga in 2012?
Hype · Games. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play1.1× · S&P 500 same money: $5,312
$1,000 in Zynga at the start of 2012 would be worth about $1,096 today. A plain S&P 500 index fund over the same years would have made more — the boring option won.
What happened: Zynga was bought by Take-Two in 2022.
The story
Zynga made social games like FarmVille and Words With Friends, which hundreds of millions of people played inside Facebook, often while sending reluctant friends requests for virtual cows. Founded by Mark Pincus, it went public in December 2011 at $10 a share, valued as the future of gaming. By 2012 the stock had collapsed by roughly three-quarters as Facebook changed its platform rules, players moved to mobile and hits proved hard to repeat. An expensive acquisition of OMGPOP, maker of Draw Something, quickly turned into a write-down.
The second half was a slow and genuinely impressive repair job. Under CEO Frank Gibeau from 2016, Zynga refocused on mobile, bought studios such as Small Giant Games and Gram Games, and kept a steady stream of live games running. Revenue grew and investors returned. In 2022 Take-Two Interactive acquired it for about $9.86 a share in cash and stock, almost exactly where the 2012 buyer started, after a decade of drama.
The lesson: A broken growth stock can be turned around, but a successful recovery may only return investors to where they started, with a decade lost.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2012 | $9.00 | $1,096 | $5,312 | 1.1× |
| 2015 | $2.70 | $3,652 | $3,301 | 3.7× |
| 2018 | $4.00 | $2,465 | $2,519 | 2.5× |
| 2020 | $6.00 | $1,643 | $2,092 | 1.6× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2015, turning $1,000 into $3,652. The S&P 500 from that same year: $3,301.
Now try it without hindsight. The wheel decides the year and the asset class, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick, and we simulate to today. Zynga is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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