Last month, Zynga’s CEO and founder Mark Pincus stepped aside as the company’s top executive in favor of Don Mattrick, the former president of Interactive Entertainment Business at Microsoft. (Pincus still remains as chairman of Zynga.) On Tuesday, however, Mattrick decided to restructure the top ranks.

According to a Wall Street Journal report citing anonymous sources, “Chief Operating Officer David Ko, Chief People Officer Colleen McCreary, and Chief Technology Officer Cadir Lee will step down from their positions and leave the company.” The paper said that Mattrick was expected to make a formal announcement later in the day.

Kelly Kunz, a Zynga spokesperson, declined to comment to Ars.

In a conference call with investors earlier this month, Mattrick indicated that there were changes afoot.

“Over the course of the next few months I will be working with our leadership team to challenge previous assumptions and to focus on business fundamentals, which, candidly, we’ve struggled with over the past year,” he said. “We anticipate two to four quarters of volatility as we work through resetting and developing our strategy for growing topline revenue and profit. I’ll be detailing more of this in coming calls and look forward to keeping you up to date on our progress. Getting a business back on track isn’t easy and isn’t quick. We have a lot of hard work in front of us, but I believe we can succeed as a team and Zynga can do this.”

As we reported earlier, the once top-dog has gone through a bit of a rough patch over the last year. In the summer of 2012, the company quickly lost a bunch of executives and managers. That October, the company announced that it overpaid for OMGPOP (maker of Draw Something). Then Pincus was ousted and the company suddenly shut down OMGPOP as well.

“How come they couldn’t execute fast enough?”

Industry analysts told Ars that there has been concern about the company’s direction. In its most recent earnings report, the company said it lost 25 percent of its daily active users.

Brian Blau, an analyst at Gartner Research, told Ars that Zynga has been slow to come up with new hits reaching the level of Mafia Wars or Farmville—and that the company needs fresh blood.

"After the unplanned departure of many [others in] Zynga's top management over the past year, these executives can now be added to the departures list, leaving one with the impression that the team built by Mark Pincus has completely come undone," he said.

Similarly, Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, told Ars that the company’s costs (read: employees) are too high.

"Zynga’s revenue declines are more of a function of loss of market share, because they haven’t innovated since their first few games, nothing’s been all that great,” he said. “They need to lose another 1,500 [people], hopefully out of 800 or 1,000 people left they’ll have a few people that are good. I’m confident that [CEO Don Mattrick] will take the right approach, [but] he may not succeed. The average mobile game, like Temple Run, costs $70,000 to make. Do you think Zynga’s ever made a game that cost $70,000? Their games [can cost] $20 million to make.”

His advice for Zynga?

“Run it like a startup—Pincus didn’t run it that way,” he said.

(Ars is currently researching a long feature on Zynga, analyzing what has gone wrong at the company. If you're a former or current Zynga employee and would like to speak to us, please get in touch.)

UPDATE 6:41pm CT: Zynga CEO Don Mattrick posted this to a company blog:

"As part of the change, Cadir Lee, Colleen McCreary, and David Ko will be leaving the company to pursue other interests," he wrote. "With the above in place, I believe that we will have the best chance to grow, build a world class executive team and culture, establish cadence and really become committed to important priorities and opportunities for our long term success."