Draw Something Erasing Itself from Consideration

Like millions of smartphone users I was intrigued by Draw Something. The pictionary style mobile game app was fun for several reasons: you could display your artistic skills depending on the amount of time and effort you could afford, you could increase your color pallet by simply drawing more difficult choices to build your points total quicker, and the game was simple and easy to use.

Zynga evidently liked the app too. They recently ponied up $200M reasons to buy the game from OMGPOP. The Words With Friends and Online Poker owners wanted to continue their Midas touch by bring Draw Something into the fold. Unfortunately for Zynga, consumers started recognizing some common trends in the Draw Something word banks. Once you’ve figured out the small number of words the game becomes simply boring. In less than a month, the user base has dropped from 15M to 10M mobile gamers. Now they’ve still got 10M regular users, but losing 30% of your user base in 30 days is something to be concerned with especially after you just bought the game a month ago.

Can Zynga save it? I don’t know, but they might want to start by adding a few word choices. I myself hardly ever play it anymore, and the friends that I usually play against have just about quit using it too. It was fun at first, but quickly grew tiring. I’ll bet OMGPOP is smiling like the cat that ate the canary.