In Zynga's July 2011 prospectus to future shareholders, company founder and CEO Mark Pincus outlined his firm's ambitious plan to take over the gaming world.

"My kids decided a few months ago that peek-a-boo was their favorite game," he wrote. "While it's unlikely that we can improve upon this classic, I look forward to playing Zynga games with them very soon. When they enter high school, there's no doubt that they'll search on Google, they'll share with their friends on Facebook, and they'll probably do a lot of shopping on Amazon. And I'm planning for Zynga to be there when they want to play."

Will it? At the time, Pincus had ample reason for confidence. Zynga was riding high after several years of success. Since its July 2007 founding, Zynga raked in hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital, launched massive hits like FarmVille, Mafia Wars, and CityVille, and turned a 2010 profit of $90.5 million. It was also on an acquisition binge, picking up 11 companies in as many months between 2010 and 2011.

But even as the prospectus was published, Zynga's star was losing its luster. For one thing, profitability was an aberration; 2010 was the only year that Zynga made a profit, and since 2008 the company has sustained a net loss of just under $600 million.

Then there was the company's stock. After the December 2011 initial public offering (IPO) at $9.50 per share, the stock price rose as high as $14.69 on March 2, 2012. It's been on a steady decline since. As of this writing, the stock price is hovering around $3.00 per share.

Finally, Zynga has seen a massive erosion of its user base, one that has accelerated in recent months. The industry analysis firm AppData estimates that Zynga's Monthly Average Users (MAUs) have now fallen below 127 million, the company's lowest level in four years. And in just a single quarter during 2013, the company lost more than one-quarter of its most loyal daily users.

As a result, hundreds of Zynga employees have been laid off, Pincus has been replaced as CEO, and three top executives have recently been tossed out. The new CEO, Don Mattrick, told investors on the company's most recent earnings call to expect "two to four quarters of volatility." In other words, the company has a rocky short-term future ahead of it.

In interviews with current and former Zynga employees, a picture emerges of a firm that underwent an astonishing rise but soon found itself sagging under the weight of over-management, missed opportunities, and the lack of a real long-term vision. Zynga declined to make any executives available for this story, only sending Ars a transcript of the company's most recent earnings call.

"A lot of people internally at Zynga are jaded," said Dave Dopson, a former Zynga principal engineer who is now at another major Silicon Valley company. "The whole company is very short-term minded. There must have been some artists that like drawing cutesy characters, but [to the] majority of the people, [it's like]: we found this money-printing machine; help us oil the wheels and make more money.

"Here's the real question you need to answer: once they cut all the high-expense ratio, the stuff that they do at a cost point that's so high, is there anything left? Is there still a core of things that's profitable, and how big is that company?"

“Every horrible thing in the book”

Pincus rose rapidly through the venture capital and financial services world with his net worth steadily increasing at nearly every point along the way. Before reaching the age of 50, he was already listed on Forbes' list of billionaires.

After receiving his MBA from Harvard Business School in 1993, Pincus went to work for Tele-Communications, Inc., which later became AT&T Cable. Two years later he founded Freeloader, a simple way for people to publish webpages, and he sold it seven months later for $38 million. Four years later he founded his second company, Support.com, which later went public. Finally, in 2003, Pincus founded tribe.net, a short-lived social network that was originally funded by various big names in media and venture capital, including The Washington Post, Knight Ridder Digital, and the Mayfield Fund. After initial failure, Pincus bought the company back from investors, refocused it, and eventually sold it to Cisco.

Despite the successes, though, Pincus still felt like he had not yet "arrived" in Silicon Valley. "There's an A-list here, and then there's everyone else," he told The New York Times Magazine in 2005. "And I'm not A-list."

In May 2007, Facebook opened up an API in an attempt to quash MySpace and other social networks by inviting developers to build apps that would run on top of Facebook. Pincus saw an opportunity, and within two months he launched what became Zynga Poker.

"Obviously, before they opened it up, nobody really even knew what a powerful thing a Facebook app could be," Pincus told Mediabistro in 2009. "While I was doing Tribe, we realized that there would be a new arms race in new software features for social networks. The whole time I was doing Tribe, I thought that the thing I would have loved to do is games. I've always said that social networks are like a great cocktail party: You're happy at first to see your good friends, but the value of the cocktail party is in the weak ties. It's the people you wouldn't have thought of meeting; it's the friends-of-friends.

"What I thought was the ultimate thing you can do—once you bring all of your friends and their friends together—is play games," he added. "And I've always been a closet gamer, but I never have the time and can never get all of my friends together in one place. So the power of my friends already being there and connected, and then adding games, seemed like a big idea."

Pincus knew that being first with a popular Facebook game could essentially be a one-way ticket to success. He told the New York Times in January 2008 that rival game makers "will be faced with an opportunity to launch a game in the directory next to 1,300 other games and hope it gets found or to launch a game with us."

But in addition to timing its move into social gaming well, the new company also engaged in some dodgier shenanigans to drum up users. According to an e-book by VentureBeat reporter Dean Takahashi, in March 2008 Zynga added a "lead generation" mechanism where players could get in-game chips if they agreed to take part in some sort of sketchy revenue-generating deals, like accepting a sign-up offer.

As Pincus himself famously summarized it before an audience of University of California, Berkeley students in the spring of 2009, the tactics were acceptable ways to gain the control he wanted:

I knew that I wanted to control my destiny, so I knew I needed revenues right fucking now. Like, I needed revenues now. So I funded the company myself but I did every horrible thing in the book to—just to get revenues right away. I mean we gave our users poker chips if they downloaded this zwinky toolbar which was like, I don't know, I downloaded it once and couldn't get rid of it. [laughs] We did anything possible just to just get revenues so that we could grow and be a real business—so control your destiny. That was a big lesson, controlling your business. So by the time we raised money we were profitable.

Investors came knocking. In 2008, Zynga received $5 million in venture capital from Union Square Ventures to fund a company of just 27 people. In 2009, another major VC firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, kicked in $29 million.

But Zynga didn't hit the big time until it had two smash hits, Mafia Wars (June 2008) and FarmVille (June 2009). FarmVille in particular was a runaway success. Within two months, Zynga announced that the game was gaining "more than one million new daily active users a week on average."