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Still loss-making and losing players, but Zynga sees FY15 Q2 sales up 9% to $200 million

Trying times

Still loss-making and losing players, but Zynga sees FY15 Q2 sales up 9% to $200 million

US majority mobile game publisher Zynga (NASDAQ:ZNGA) has announced its FY15 Q2 financials, for the 3 months ending 30 June 2015.

Revenue was $200 million, up 30 percent year-on-year and 9 percent quarter-on-quarter.

However the company remains loss-making.

The net loss during the quarter was $27 million, although that's down from $62.5 million a year ago and $46.5 million in the January-March 2015 period.

Zynga continues to cut back staffing levels.

It's currently in the midst of a cost reduction plan that cost it $12 million during the quarter.

However, it's not going out of business anytime soon as it ended the quarter with $1.1 billion in cash and equivalents in the bank.

Good news

Mobile games represented around 66 percent of business, while the revenue Zynga generates from advertising rose 44 percent to $38 million.

Other operational highlights included 32 percent quarter-on-quarter growth in its Slots games. Zynga has also signed a deal with Warner Bros. to make a slot game using the Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory brand.

Empires & Allies is off to a solid start

New strategy game Empires & Allies is also doing well, boasting an average play frequency of 5 sessions of total time 38 minutes daily.

And average daily bookings per daily player for the game were almost three times higher than Zynga's average across all its games.

Bad news

Yet, as with Gameloft and EA Mobile, Zynga is losing audience.

It has 21 million daily active players, down 15 percent compared to FY15 Q1.

It has 83 million monthly active players, down 18 percent sequentially.

Yet Zynga's measure of daily revenue per player was up 21 percent sequentially and 29 percent annually to $0.091.

Hence, Zynga seems to be getting better at monetising its players faster than its losing players.

[source: Zynga]

Contributing Editor

A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon is Contributing Editor at PG.biz which means he acts like a slightly confused uncle who's forgotten where he's left his glasses. As well as letters and cameras, he likes imaginary numbers and legumes.