Social gaming company Zynga (NASDAQ: ZNGA) has announced its Q1 FY13 figures for the three months ending 31 March 2013.

Revenue was $264 million, down 18 percent year-on-year.

Net income was $4.1 million, compared to a loss of $85.4 million a year ago.

Indeed, it's the company's first profit since it floated in late 2011.

Nevertheless, this is a challenging time for Zynga as CEO Mark Pincus confessed.

"2013 will continue to be a transition year as we face the challenging environment on the web and invest in developing the leading franchises and network across web and mobile platforms," he stated.

He was keen to highlight the upside adding, "We are encouraged by the strong execution from our teams and the breakout hit performance of FarmVille 2, which captures the imagination of nearly 40 million players every month."

Deeper and down

The key metric that Zynga is struggling, however, with is its declining user base.

Its daily active user numbers decreased from 65 million in Q1 of 2012 to 52 million - that's down 21 percent year-on-year.

Even on a consecutive quarter basis, DAUs were down 8 percent.

Similarly, monthly active users were down 15 percent consecutively to 253 million, while mobile unique users were down 10 percent to 150 million.

Monthly unique payers were down to 2.5 million, down 14 percent compared to the previous quarter.

A measure of daily revenue per player (average daily bookings per average DAU) dropped 2 percent to $0.051.

Big warchest

Of course, while these are bad figures, Zynga remains a massive player in the social and mobile gaming space.

For one thing, it has $1.67 billion in terms of cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities, slightly up from its total at the end of 2012.

And cash flow from operations in Q1 was $26.4 million.

However, with investor sentiment heavily negative compared to the glory days when Facebook was a money-making machine for the company, its move to balance its business across web, mobile and Facebook will likely continue to result in difficult financials during 2013.

Still, with anticipated mobile games such as Eden to Green, Draw Something 2 and Battlestone in testing, it has the potential to begin a fight back.

[source: Zynga IR]