Zynga has confirmed that the company recently slashed 18 percent of its total global workforce, cutting 520 jobs across its Los Angeles, New York, Austin and Dallas studios.

In an official blog post, CEO Mark Pincus writes that “None of us ever expected to face a day like today, especially when so much of our culture has been about growth.”

“But I think we all know this is necessary to move forward. The scale that served us so well in building and delivering the leading social gaming service on the Web is now making it hard to successfully lead across mobile and multiplatform, which is where social games are going to be played.”

Pincus noted that the company would be taking care of their laid off employees, saying Zynga would offer “generous severance packages that reflect our appreciation for all of their work”.

Source: Zynga

Remember how EA sued Zynga, claiming explosively that their two games were so similar as to be identical to a casual observer? And then Zynga counter-sued EA, lashing out with claims that EA was just mad, bro, that their crappy little online games weren’t as good as Zyngas?

Well, seven months on, and what could have been a highly entertaining courtroom drama has instead been settled out of court with no drama at all. In fact, both companies released the following, identical statement over the weekend: “EA and Zynga have resolved their respective claims and have reached a settlement of their litigation in the Northern District of California.”

However, as AllThingsDigital reports, EA may not have too much to worry about — Zynga’s ‘The Ville’, the game at the center of EA’s lawsuit, is one of the games marked to be phased out as Zynga rapidly cuts costs and rearranges its internal operations to avoid bankruptcy following months of consecutively poor financials.

Source: AllThingD

Look friends, I know you don’t play Farmville 2. I don’t play Farmville 2. There’s probably nothing wrong with playing Farmville 2, but it’s not exactly our bag in these parts, is it? Horses for courses, and all that.

However I think we should all stop a moment and consider the fact that 40 million people do play Farmville 2 every month, and 8 million every day. According to statistics released by Zynga, it’s Facebook’s most popular game both daily and monthly. 30 million players check in with each others’ farms every day. 350 million crops are harvested every day. And it’s just one of a number of Zynga’s successful titles.

And yet, despite these staggeringly enormous numbers, Zynga is in financial trouble, cutting costs, staff, entire studios and games and rapidly re-thinking its business. Are social and Facebook gaming naysayers right after all?

Source: Zynga

J.P. Morgan analyst Doug Anmuth is no small fry in the financial analyst business, and now he’s gone on record over at the LA Times to say that Zynga’s stock is worth almost literally nothing, less value than the actual cash that the company has on hand, less even than the value of the real estate and furniture it owns.

A report released by J.P. Morgan last week shows a company whose shares are valued at $2.35 per share, but whose company assets, cash, securities and property are valued at $2.46. The company warned on October 5 that it was expecting a poor financial performance in 2012, and as a result shares almost immediately dropped by another 16%.

Analysts are now expecting significant layoffs, and continued poor performance into the next few quarters.

Source: VG247

Remember when EA sued Zynga, saying that The Ville was “largely indistinguishable” from The Sims Social? Zynga have hit back over the weekend, and even gone so far as to accuse EA games of being angry about their own failures to understand the casual market on the deep level Zynga clearly does.

“EA’s lawsuit ultimately rests on the implausible assumption that Zynga would launch a ‘copy’ of a game that had failed months before Zynga released its own game,” reads just one of the many venemously barbed lines in Zynga’s call for a trial by jury.

“By the time Zynga launched The Ville, the user base for EA’s The Sims Social had plummeted, and Zynga is informed and believes that EA already had relegated the game to its India Studio where EA games in decline are sent to be inexpensively maintained and ultimately discontinued.”

Zynga then goes on to claim that EA does not own and can not copyright things like “sitting on a couch watching TV, taking a shower, and going to sleep in a bed”. EA has responded to the counter-suit by calling it “predictable subterfuge aimed at diverting attention from Zynga’s persistent plagiarism of other artists and studios”. Snap.

Source: Joystiq

The title says it all really: EA are suing Zynga, claiming that they’ve ripped off EA’s Facebook game, Sims Social, with their Facebook game, The Ville. Zynga being accused of being glorified rip-off merchants isn’t exactly the most groundbreaking claim, but this is the first time a company as brutally large and financially well-supported as EA has ever challenged them.

EA spells the case out in their press release, which says “the infringement of The Sims Social was unmistakable to those of us at Maxis as well as to players and the industry at large,” and “the copying was so comprehensive that the two games are, to an uninitiated observer, largely indistinguishable”. Stop beating around the bush EA, tell us what you really think!

Source: EA (thanks to PalZer0 for the tip)

Three gaming titans, namely EA, Microsoft and Zynga, have joined the growing list of companies and cities that are filing a brief to legally challenge the Defence of Marriage Act, which as you might know, states marriage is defined as being between a man and a woman.

In EA’s announcement they cite financial and tax reasons for supporting for cause, but alongside their equal opportunities policy, seems like they’re just more interested in doing the right thing.

Source: VG247