Draw Something launched in February 2012, was downloaded more than 35 million times in about six weeks, and was bought by Zynga on March 21, 2012 for purchase consideration of approximately $183.1 million in cash, a figure Zynga stated in its own Form 10-Q filed with the SEC. Within seven months Zynga disclosed an estimated impairment charge of $85 million to $95 million against the assets it had just bought. Its developer, OMGPOP, was closed on June 3, 2013 as part of a 520 person layoff, and the omgpop.com game network went dark on September 30, 2013. The game itself outlived the studio for years, but Zynga’s own games page, checked on September 8, 2026, no longer lists Draw Something at all.
The Rise Was Genuinely Unprecedented, and That Is the Problem
It is easy to remember Draw Something as a fad and leave it there. The numbers are worth stating properly, because the speed is the entire explanation for everything that followed.
OMGPOP was a New York studio that had spent years shipping web games without a hit. Draw Something was, by the studio’s own account, close to its last attempt. It launched in February 2012, and by the time Zynga announced the acquisition on March 21, 2012, TechCrunch reported the game had passed 35 million downloads in roughly six weeks. That was, at the time, one of the fastest adoption curves any mobile application had ever produced.
The mechanic was almost embarrassingly simple. One player draws a word, the other guesses it, and the drawing replays stroke by stroke for the guesser. There was no timer pressure, no matchmaking, no skill ladder. You played it with people you already knew, in your own time, and the replay was the joke.
Simplicity is what made it spread. It is also what made it impossible to defend.
What Zynga Actually Paid, According to the Filing
Press coverage in March 2012 quoted figures between $180 million and $210 million, because the deal had an earnout attached and different outlets counted different parts of it. Those headline numbers still circulate today, usually as “Zynga wasted $200 million.”
The number worth using is the one Zynga put in a regulatory filing. Zynga’s Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2012, filed with the SEC and read September 8, 2026, states that on March 21, 2012 the company acquired 100 percent of the outstanding stock of OMGPOP for purchase consideration of approximately $183.1 million in cash.
That is the checkable figure, and it is the one this page uses.
The Fall Happened Before the Ink Dried
Here is the part that makes Draw Something unusual in this genre of story. Most acquisitions go wrong over years. This one went wrong over weeks.
Zynga bought a product at the exact top of a curve that had taken six weeks to build. Daily play began sliding almost immediately after the deal, and by the autumn the company had to account for it publicly.
In its third quarter 2012 results announcement, filed with the SEC as an exhibit and read September 8, 2026, Zynga said its results would “include an estimated impairment charge between $85 million and $95 million (excluding any income tax impact) related to the intangible assets previously acquired in connection with the company’s purchase of OMGPOP.”
Read that against the purchase price. Roughly half the value of the acquisition was written off inside seven months of buying it.
Why It Fell So Fast
Four things, and none of them is “people got bored,” which explains nothing.
There was nothing to come back for. Draw Something had no progression, no seasons, no reason to open it on day forty that did not exist on day one. The novelty was the entire product, and novelty has a half life.
The social graph was a closed loop. You played with the friends who already had it. Once your particular group stopped, the game was over for you regardless of how many strangers were still playing. Apps that depend on a small circle of real friends die group by group, and each group’s exit is invisible to the company until it has already happened.
Everyone drew the same thing. The word lists were finite, and within weeks the shared experience had collapsed into the same handful of prompts. A game whose content is generated by the players still needs the prompts to keep surprising them.
It was pushed hard into monetization at the worst moment. Coins, hint purchases and ad load all increased under new ownership at the same time as the audience was thinning, which is the standard way to accelerate a decline you are trying to slow.
Compare that with a mobile game of the same era that survived the same cliff by rebuilding its business rather than its download numbers, which is what we set out in what happened to Angry Birds. Rovio had characters, a film, merchandising and a decade of sequels to fall back on. Draw Something had a drawing pad.
Draw Something 2 and the Redesign Trap
Zynga’s answer, in April 2013, was Draw Something 2: more drawing tools, colors, textures, a feed, and social features layered on top of the original loop.
It did not work, and the reason it did not work is a pattern worth naming, because it recurs across the whole 2010s internet. When a product’s appeal is that it is small, adding features to save it removes the thing people liked. The audience that left did not leave because there were too few brushes.
That is the same trap that took down a much larger site when it rebuilt itself around a redesign its users had not asked for, which we cover in what happened to Digg. Both cases share a structure: management correctly identified that engagement was falling, and incorrectly concluded that the answer was more product.
What Happened to Draw Something’s Developer, OMGPOP
This is the detail most retellings get wrong, so it is worth separating cleanly. The studio closed before the game did.
On June 3, 2013, Zynga announced it was cutting 520 employees, about 18 percent of its workforce, and closing its Los Angeles, New York and Dallas offices. The New York office was OMGPOP. Chief executive Mark Pincus published a letter to staff on Zynga’s corporate blog the same day describing it as a hard day for the company. Contemporary coverage of the announcement is on Game Developer, read September 8, 2026.
The OMGPOP team asked to buy back the site and its older games. According to TechCrunch’s reporting from August 5, 2013, read September 8, 2026, multiple former team members approached Zynga independently, some willing to take a partial sale that excluded the Draw Something assets entirely, and Zynga declined on the grounds that the legal work was not worth it.
The omgpop.com web portal and its game network shut down on September 30, 2013. The mobile Draw Something apps were explicitly not part of that shutdown and kept running.
So Can You Still Play Draw Something in 2026?
This is the question most people are actually typing, so here is what can be checked rather than what is remembered.
Zynga does not list Draw Something among its games. Zynga’s own games directory at zynga.com, read on September 8, 2026, lists more than eighty titles including Words With Friends, Zynga Poker and three FarmVille games. Neither Draw Something nor Draw Something 2 appears on it.
A company that no longer lists a game is not the same as a company that has announced a shutdown. We did not find a Zynga announcement giving a specific end of service date for Draw Something, and this page does not invent one. What is documented is the absence from the current catalog.
Store listings change without notice and vary by country. Whether a specific old build still appears in a specific storefront is something that can only be answered by looking on the day, on the device in question. This page gives no download links and no workarounds of any kind.
The honest summary is that Draw Something has been quietly de-emphasized rather than loudly killed, which is how most mobile games actually end. There is rarely a farewell post. The game simply stops being on the list.
What Draw Something Actually Proved
Its real legacy is not the game. It is what the episode taught the mobile industry about buying virality.
Before 2012, a sharp adoption curve was treated as evidence of a durable product. Draw Something is the case study that broke that assumption in public, with a price tag attached and a regulatory filing to confirm it. Six weeks of growth told you almost nothing about week fifty.
The same lesson landed again on the video side of the internet a few years later, where enormous reach and cultural dominance still did not add up to a business, which is the story in what happened to Vine. And the wider pattern of platforms that were everywhere and then were not is the subject of our roundup of dead social media platforms.
Draw Something is the smallest and cleanest version of that lesson, because the whole arc, launch to write down, fits inside a single year.
FAQ
When did Draw Something come out?
It launched in February 2012, developed by the New York studio OMGPOP. Within roughly six weeks it had passed 35 million downloads, one of the fastest adoption curves any mobile app had produced at that point.
How much did Zynga pay for Draw Something?
Zynga’s Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2012 states that it acquired OMGPOP on March 21, 2012 for purchase consideration of approximately $183.1 million in cash. Press reports at the time quoted figures between $180 million and $210 million because of the way the earnout was counted.
Did Zynga lose money on Draw Something?
Yes, and the company said so. Its third quarter 2012 results announcement disclosed an estimated impairment charge of between $85 million and $95 million against the intangible assets acquired with OMGPOP, roughly half the purchase price, within seven months of the deal.
What happened to OMGPOP?
Zynga closed the studio on June 3, 2013 as part of a layoff of 520 employees, about 18 percent of its workforce, that also shut its Los Angeles and Dallas offices. The omgpop.com web game network was switched off on September 30, 2013.
Is Draw Something still available?
Zynga’s own games directory, read on September 8, 2026, does not list Draw Something or Draw Something 2. We found no Zynga announcement naming a specific end of service date, so the accurate statement is that the game is no longer in the company’s published catalog.
The Short Version
- Launched February 2012, more than 35 million downloads in about six weeks.
- Zynga acquired OMGPOP on March 21, 2012 for approximately $183.1 million in cash, per its own SEC filing.
- An estimated $85 million to $95 million impairment was disclosed in the third quarter of 2012.
- The studio closed June 3, 2013; omgpop.com went dark on September 30, 2013.
- Draw Something 2, April 2013, added features to a product whose appeal was that it had none.
- Not in Zynga’s current games list, checked September 8, 2026.
