Social gaming giant Zynga is reporting huge revenue boosts for Q1 2021, despite the hazards of the pandemic. The revenue leap was bolstered by successful games such as Harry Potter: Puzzles and Spells, as well as in increase in advertising earnings. But all that cash coming in was not enough to keep the company from also announcing losses to the tune of $23 million for that same period.
The big news for Zynga was that its earnings were an astonishing $680.3 million. That’s up around 68 percent over Q1 2020. Most of that revenue, around $557 million came on the strength of the company’s massive online game portfolio. That category was led by the strength of Toon Blast, Toy Blast and Harry Potter: Puzzles and Spells and was up 61 percent over last year. Advertising revenue was also up, to the tune of $123.3 million, up 107 percent over last year.
Unfortunately, the company wound up spending $685.8 million, up 38 percent over last year, so that Q1 2021 actually booked in as revenue loss, according to a Zynga earnings report.
Frank Gibeau, Chief Executive Officer at Zynga was upbeat about the company’s revenue and recent acquisitions saying, “We are off to an excellent start in 2021 with record Q1 results driven by breakout performances from our live services, new games and hyper-casual portfolio. Today, we announced our intent to acquire Chartboost, a leading advertising and monetization platform. This transformational acquisition will combine Zynga’s high-quality games portfolio and first-party data with Chartboost’s proven advertising and monetization platform to create a new level of audience scale and meaningfully enhance our competitive advantage in the mobile ecosystem.”