Gaming company Zynga continues to work toward being profitable again by revamping some its most popular products — including the release of "New Words With Friends" Thursday.
After releasing its first built-for-mobile version of Farmville back in April, Zynga has now released an update to world's most popular mobile word game, Words With Friends.
Some of the new features include solo play, which originally was only available with the paid version of the app; an in-app dictionary that is searchable and can tell players how frequently a word is used in Words With Friends; and community match.
Many are comparing the community match feature to the Tinder app. Time writes, "players can now choose to challenge someone nearby and select whether that person is male or female; ... one swipes left to skip them and swipes right to ask for a match."
The original Words With Friends was released in 2009 but rose to prominence in the Apple app store in 2011. According to Zynga, more than 55 million matches are being played on the popular mobile game at any given moment around the world.
Whether the new Words With Friends is as successful as the original is yet to be seen. But either way, the people of Zynga could really use a boost.
"Eight months after its initial public offering, the company had lost 70% of its value."
"The company cut games as tens of millions of users fled the platform. Down to 123 million by the end of 2013."
After peaking above $14 in 2012, Zynga's stock price hasn't been able to rise past 6 bucks in the past two years and sat at less than $2.50 as of mid-day Thursday.
With all this in mind, the last thing Zynga wants to do is scare off loyal customers. If players want to continue playing the older version of the word game app, the update is not required.
This video contains images from Getty Images and Incase / CC BY 2.0 & torbakhopper / CC BY 2.0
