Zynga shares dive on trimmed earnings forecast

Zynga shares plunged anew on Thursday after the company behind social games such as "FarmVille" cut its earnings forecast for the year. Zynga cited curbed play of its games along with delays in releasing new titles as among the cause for reducing its revenue expectations. The San Francisco-based company said it will also be hit with a writedown of as much as $95 million from its purchase early this year of OMGPOP, the startup behind the "Draw Something" game that was a smartphone hit. Zynga reportedly paid about $200 million for New York City-based OMGPOP. The firm's shares dove more than 18 percent to $2.28 in after-market trading on the Nasdaq. "The third quarter of 2012 continued to be challenging and, while many of our games performed to plan, as a whole we did not execute to our satisfaction," said Zynga chief executive Mark Pincus. "We remain optimistic about the opportunity for social gaming and the power of our player network of 311 million monthly active users." Pincus said Zynga would implement targeted cost cuts in the final quarter of the year to tune its research and development to reflect "strategic priorities" that included targeting players on smartphones and tablet computers. Zynga saw its stock price plummet more than a third in July after the company badly missed second-quarter earnings expectations. Shares at that time slid 38 percent to $3.16 in reaction to the news of a $22 million loss for the company, which went public last year at $10 a share. Zynga jumped into the stock market with a billion-dollar listing in December. Offering 100 million shares -- a seventh of the company's total -- the maker of FarmVille and Zynga Poker was valued at a whopping $7 billion, but has since been cut by more than half.