OMGPop
Summer 2006AcquiredAn independent flash game studio.
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Explore the risks and possibilities with a prompt for ChatGPT, Claude, or your agent.
An independent flash game studio.
Explore the risks and possibilities with a prompt for ChatGPT, Claude, or your agent.
OMGPop spent six years and roughly 35 games searching for a breakout before Draw Something found one in seven weeks. Founded by Charles Forman in 2006 as the playful dating site iminlikewithyou, the company pivoted into social games, renamed itself in 2009, and nearly ran out of time before launching its asynchronous drawing game on February 6, 2012.[1][2]
By March 21, Draw Something had passed 35 million downloads, nearly three billion drawings, and 13.3 million daily active users. Zynga bought 100 percent of OMGPop's stock that day for $183.1 million in cash consideration.[3][4] The game then lost daily users, Zynga impaired $95.5 million of acquired assets, and the studio closed in June 2013. Several games and the website shut later, while Draw Something, its sequel, and Draw My Thing explicitly continued.
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Forman started the company in 2006 as iminlikewithyou, an auction-style dating concept. Users treated the dating mechanic more seriously than intended, so the team moved toward games. The unwieldy domain created another problem: people struggled to type iminlikewithyou.com. In 2009, the company renamed itself OMGPop.[1][5]
The early catalog included Draw My Thing, an online drawing-and-guessing game, and Blockles, a falling-block game. OMGPop raised $5 million in March 2009 in a round led by Bessemer Venture Partners with Spark Capital and Baseline Ventures. The business was advertising-supported, with subscriptions and virtual goods planned.[5]
Dan Porter later became CEO and led the company through Draw Something and the Zynga sale. He was not the original founder. Forman left in 2011 but retained equity. In a later profile, Forman described his success criterion as creating something a child would work hard to obtain, a product-first aspiration rather than a financial target.[6]
OMGPop raised another $10.1 million in January 2011 from investors including Spark Capital, Betaworks, Rho Capital, and SoftBank. It said it was adding 50,000 users each day and had increased monthly active users fivefold in six months after moving onto Facebook. Cupcake Corner had served more than one billion virtual cupcakes.[7]
Those numbers did not produce the breakout the company needed. Despite roughly 35 games and about $17 million in reported funding, former employees said OMGPop was approaching a possible May 2012 shutdown. Then the team adapted Draw My Thing into an asynchronous mobile game in which two people alternated drawing a prompted word and guessing the result.[1][2]
The packet paraphrases founder reflections but preserves no verbatim founder quote. Two direct quotations cannot be supplied responsibly.
OMGPop was a social-game studio, first on the open web and later on Facebook, iPhone, and Android. Before its hit, it produced roughly 35 games across drawing, puzzles, virtual goods, and casual multiplayer play. Its 2011 plan called for five Facebook and iPhone releases within six months and opening its website to outside developers.[7]
Draw Something stripped drawing down to a turn-based loop. One player selected a prompted word and drew it; the other guessed. The asynchronous design let friends play without being online together. The game converted the older live browser experience of Draw My Thing into a mobile interaction that generated an invitation, a drawing, a guess, and a return turn.
The growth loop was deliberate. Porter said the team built online and offline word of mouth before launch rather than treating virality as an accident.[14] Initial downloads were around 30,000; the game passed one million within ten days, then 35 million in about seven weeks.
Monetization had three parts: a free ad-supported version, a paid ad-free version, and virtual bombs that revealed letters or removed choices.[2] The packet contains no audited revenue, ad yield, paid conversion, virtual-good spending, gross margin, or acquisition-channel economics.
The acquisition plan kept the New York studio operating Draw Something while building more mobile intellectual property for Zynga.[15] Draw Something 2 launched in April 2013. That product continuity did not imply studio continuity: Porter left that month, and Zynga closed the studio in June.
Draw Something turned a two-person game into its acquisition channel. Each turn created a reason to invite, notify, guess, and return. By March 21, the game had exceeded 35 million downloads and nearly three billion drawings. Contemporary reporting put daily active users at 13.3 million, 4.8 million above Words With Friends.[3][15]
These were different metrics. Downloads counted acquisition; drawings counted content volume; daily active users measured one-day participation. None alone established cohort retention or revenue. The packet has no retention series by platform, geography, or acquisition channel.
The closest comparables were Words With Friends and the wider Facebook and mobile social-game market rather than one drawing rival. OMGPop's advantage was a familiar physical game adapted to asynchronous mobile play. Its vulnerability was novelty: the same simple loop that spread quickly could exhaust quickly.
Reported daily active users peaked around 15 million and declined to about 10 million by early May. The packet cannot separate novelty decay, product changes, Zynga branding, competition, or distribution effects. It supports the decline, not a single cause.
Before Draw Something, repeated releases had not produced a breakout. That made the hit unusually valuable to Zynga and unusually difficult for OMGPop to reject. Forman said he had only $1,700 in his bank account before the deal and later described his proceeds as more than $22 million, without giving the exact amount.[1]
OMGPop began with advertising and planned subscriptions and virtual goods. Draw Something combined advertising, a paid app, and consumable bombs. No independently audited revenue or profit appears in the packet, so the acquisition cannot be evaluated on a revenue multiple.[2]
Zynga's filing provides the authoritative transaction figure: $183.1 million in cash purchase consideration for 100 percent of outstanding stock. Rounded press numbers of $180 million or $200 million should not replace it.[4]
The preliminary allocation assigned $82.3 million to developed technology, $33.3 million to branding, $5.5 million to net tangible assets, and $104.3 million to goodwill, while assuming $42.1 million of deferred tax liabilities. The packet cautions that final allocation may differ. In the third quarter, Zynga impaired $95.5 million; related intangible assets were later stated at only $5.3 million as of September 30, 2012.[9][16]
The launch trajectory was extraordinary: roughly 30,000 initial downloads, one million within ten days, more than 35 million in about seven weeks, nearly three billion drawings, and 13.3 million daily active users on acquisition day. Those figures show velocity and participation, not durable cohort quality.
The decline to about 10 million daily active users by early May was still substantial scale, but it weakened the assumption that early velocity would persist. No lifetime download, drawing, revenue, or final active-user total is authoritative in the packet.
Zynga closed the deal the same day it announced it. The strategic plan was to preserve the studio and product while adding mobile intellectual property. Yet daily use was already near its reported peak. The packet has no internal forecast, so it cannot say whether Zynga assumed the peak would continue.
The non-obvious mechanism was metric compression. Downloads, drawings, and daily users all rose together during launch, making them look like one signal. They represented different behaviors and different decay rates. When daily participation fell, cumulative downloads and drawing totals could keep the story looking large.
In the third quarter of 2012, Zynga stopped development of certain acquired games and recorded the $95.5 million impairment. The filing does not enumerate every affected title. Porter left in April 2013, and the studio closed June 3 amid 520 company-wide layoffs, about 18 percent of Zynga's workforce.[9][11]
Most studio employees were laid off. A former vice president of people said she learned through Facebook that she had lost her job and the office had closed. The OMGPop account acknowledged that June 3 was the final Zynga workday for many staff. These statements establish the communication breakdown but do not reconstruct every employee outcome.
The packet contains no verbatim named-source quote, so the canonical direct-quote requirement remains an explicit evidence gap.
Former employees tried to buy back the website and games, but Zynga declined. Cupcake Corner, Gem Rush, Pool World Champ, and Snoops were scheduled to close at the end of August; the website was scheduled for September 30.[12][13]
Draw Something, Draw Something 2, and Draw My Thing were explicitly excluded and continued under Zynga. The company had been acquired in 2012; the studio closed in June 2013; employees were laid off; the website and some games closed later; and the core drawing products survived. Collapsing those into one shutdown date would erase the actual lifecycle. The drawing franchise's later commercial and operational fate is not traced in the packet.