Zynga shares more of its troubles with its flagship poker game

In early September, Zynga launched the new Zynga Poker, a new mobile version of the flagship game that has generated more than 100 billion hands of poker since 2007. The publisher has had more than 350 million players over this title’s history.

But the launch was admittedly a tough one, said chief executive Don Mattrick in a conference call with analysts about Zynga’s third fiscal quarter earnings. As previously reported, so many players complained that it agreed to bring back the old version, dubbed Zynga Poker Classic, as another option.

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Zynga Poker was 27 percent of the $175 million in revenue in the third-fiscal quarter. Zynga has updated Zynga Poker hundreds of times, but the new update was the most extensive that the company has ever done. That’s a measure of how hard the company is trying to succeed in mobile.

But on top of the problem of many players preferring the old version, the new poker game also didn’t run well on a lot of older devices, Mattrick said.

“To rectify that, we brought our legacy product, Zynga Poker Classic, in addition to new Zynga Poker,” Mattrick said. “We are dedicated to our poker community, many of whom have been playing for the last seven years. We missed the mark on new Zynga Poker. And as a result, we lost audience and let down a segment of our consumers.”

Players can switch between the games easily and transfer their status, play history, and chips. Zynga Poker is still the largest online social poker game in the world, Mattrick said.