Building Forever Franchises: 13 Years of Lessons from Zynga's EVP Studios, Yaron Leyvand
From director of user acquisition to EVP of Mobile Studios, Yaron Leyvand has witnessed Zynga's complete transformation—and helped drive it.
Yaron Leyvand joined Zynga in May 2013 as Director of User Acquisition. Nearly 13 years later, he's now leading all of Zynga’s Mobile Studios in a pivotal role as a part of Take-Two Interactive. In a rare, candid conversation on the Deconstructor of Fun podcast, Yaron shared the principles, pivots, and painful lessons that have shaped one of social gaming's most enduring companies.
Forever Franchises: Definition of Games That Last
Zynga has games running for 16, 17, and even 18 years. They are known as forever franchises: games that have at least five years at a meaningful scale, generating $100 million or more in annual revenue. But it's more than longevity and revenue. Yaron says the game experience must evolve for players who've been engaged for years.
The core game must work by itself. If players don't want to return to the core loop without extra incentives, no amount of meta features will save it. The process starts simple: describe, prototype, and playtest the game to prove your thesis.
Early on, the feedback is all qualitative, but eventually, you need market KPIs. Day 30 retention is critical, but it's not just the number; it's the shape of the retention curve. A day 30 retention of 20% might look good, but if day 14 was 40%, the steep decline is a red flag.
Cloning doesn't work. While looking at the market helps understand what resonates, true breakouts require finding things people haven't done. Zynga’s legendary founder, Mark Pincus, made the 70/20/10 framework (70% proven, 20% better, 10% new) famous. And that formula still works well for live operations and feature development, but for new games in red ocean markets? The ratio doesn't apply the same way.
For new games in mature markets, you need clear differentiation. Changing art and adding another mechanic isn't enough. Players have tried competitors; you must explain why you're different quickly, not by day 30.
Yaron's critical principle is: Fix your foundation first. Focus on your core experience until it's excellent, not just good enough, before adding other features. In practice, this means that if your first seven days aren't air-tight, don't work on later phases.
When asked what Zynga does better than anyone else, Yaron points to this balance: combining data from KPIs with the art of listening to players. With enormous amounts of data available in mobile games, just relying on numbers isn't sufficient to create entertainment. Finding how to innovate with gut feelings while using data for support, that's Zynga's strength today.
Zynga’s Three Transformations
Yaron joined Zynga 1.0 just as the first phase was ending. The company was still massive on Facebook canvas, but with mobile in the air, and the core business was declining. The key lesson? Focus. The company made a painful shift from "we want to be on mobile too" to fewer, fully-funded bets with well-thought-out ideas.
When asked about those pivotal years from 2014 to 2016, Yaron doesn't hesitate: "If you get to the point of having to do layoffs, you usually did something wrong. Better planning means you don't need to do it." It's a lesson learned through Zynga's painful pivot years, when rounds of layoffs became almost a routine.
In 2016, under the leadership of a new CEO, Frank Gibeau, Zynga 2.0 pivoted to the Forever Franchise strategy, emphasizing data while creating space for art. Every investment was evaluated against Zynga's strengths before adding another project.
The Take-Two era (Zynga 3.0), which started after the acquisition in 2022 for an eye-watering sum of $12.7 billions, allowed Zynga to reach a larger scale. Take-Two proved the perfect partner, sharing values around innovation, efficiency, and creating space for creativity to flourish.
When asked what advice he'd give himself in 2012, Yaron reflects: "Embrace change, don't fight it. You need to be comfortable enough in yourself to admit when your old playbook isn't relevant anymore."
Lessons from each era:
Hypergrowth (Zynga 1.0): When things go well, companies spread themselves too thin without the talent to support it. When succeeding, double down on focus. Be aggressive in chosen areas, but maintain discipline.
Pivot (Zynga 2.0): If fundamentals aren't working, there's no reason to build on them. Zynga went deep on team, process, marketing, and design. They started by listening to players who'd been with games for years and focused on keeping them surprised and delighted.
Take-Two (Zynga 3.0): Culture fit matters more than anything else. Understand dynamics during disagreements, not just when everyone's happy.
M&A and The City-State Model
Zynga has made nearly 40 acquisitions. A handful of amazing ones, several good ones, and several that didn’t quite work out in the end. The company learned a lot, especially when it comes to post-acquisition integration, the most difficult part of M&A.
The integration model shifted dramatically from push to pull. Early on, when Zynga was focused on social casino, there were lots of integration mandates. Roadmaps became integration roadmaps rather than game roadmaps, which doesn't work for studio morale. Teams need to make games, not onboard SDKs. Now, Zynga minimizes requirements (legal, cybersecurity, accounting basics) and makes everything else opt-in. The company offers things because they're valuable, not because they're mandated.
Studios share core values, while each studio brings something distinctive. Central teams, on the other hand, offer a "buffet of capabilities" and shared learnings. When teams collaborate well, they pull rather than having things pushed at them.
After nearly 40 acquisitions, how does culture survive? Yaron says it's about identifying, empowering, and developing second-level leaders early, those who take over when founders sooner or later depart.
Conversations with founders should happen early. You need time; waiting until the last quarter makes it rough. All founders who created those studios and businesses want to see them succeed after they leave. They're invested in finding the right transition.
When asked about the most underrated trait in great studio leaders, Yaron emphasizes listening and high EQ. "You want hunger and push, but to be effective, not just strong, leaders must feel the team, understand when and how to push, making people comfortable coming to them. Great studio leaders all have this ability, achieved through different methods."
How does Yaron operate as the one studio leader reporting to? He rarely forces decisions. Most suggestions, such as better ways to do collections, battle passes, or user acquisition, have upside. But forcing creative people who've been successful weakens bonds.
There are tradeoffs in speed with Yaron’s approach, but he says it produces better results because studios are often right about their games. Sometimes, Yaron finds himself thinking he'd do something differently, but he's reached the point of understanding that maybe he didn't share the right information or timing, or there's another factor at play.
In the end, Yaron’s role is facilitating connections between studios (half of which are in Europe, 10 time zones away) while managing KPIs, launches, and the dozens of live games that always have something happening. Micromanagement would simply be impossible.
Innovation in a Red Ocean: Failure and AI
On failure: Zynga aims to fail fast, understand what didn't work, whether you can pivot, or if the idea is unfixable.
What's healthier now: teams make many prototypes that never reach the public, stopped much earlier. Game teams themselves decide "it's not good enough" and move on without champagne or external cancellations.
When teams know they won't lose jobs for learning, there's more intellectually honest discussion, even among team members, before it reaches leadership. For early prototypes with limited investment, teams have the freedom to explore and decide. For major launches requiring big investments and many stakeholders, collaboration with marketing, finance, and leadership is required.
On AI: Zynga believes AI is a useful tool to accelerate work and open doors to things too expensive to explore before - think art styles and variations. It can take analysis from 0 to 80% quickly. The company tests extensively across disciplines with ongoing trials of vendors and internal tools.
Is all the hype reality? No, Zynga isn't seeing 80% improvements everywhere. But they're seeing pockets of improvement, and there will likely be more. When teams see success, it spreads quickly. Marketing, especially creative, may be ahead, but as Strauss Zelnick noted about Grand Theft Auto, the promised production boost isn't fully there yet. It's still early.
Personal Reflection: From Pivot to Purpose
I looked up to Zynga in early 2010 when I started my gaming career. FrontierVille, CityVille, and Empires & Allies defined my understanding of what a good game looks like. When I joined Zynga in 2014, the company was making a difficult pivot from web games to mobile, and I felt every painful moment of it.
Working at the Zynga SF HQ, I went through three CEOs, three division heads, and eight direct managers from 2014 to 2016. Rounds of layoffs, tanking stock price, and leadership changes were constant hits on the teams’ morale. There was a power struggle to define what Zynga was and what types of games it should make. Some clung desperately to the 70/20/10 formula that had worked in the past. Others pushed for innovation but lacked the focus to see it through.
It wasn't until Frank Gibeau and his executive team came in and set a clear course, anchoring on Forever Franchises above all, that the company found its footing. But even then, the transformation wasn't immediate. It required painful decisions about fundamentals, about what to stop doing as much as what to start doing.
Listening to Yaron describe Zynga today, I'm struck by how different it is from the company I left in 2016. The city-state model, the culture of letting teams test autonomously early on, and the balance between data and art. Back in my days, we were still figuring out who we were. Today, Zynga knows.
The hardest part of any pivot isn't the strategy, it's the people who have to live through it. Yaron's 13-year journey embodies something I wish I'd understood during those difficult years: sustainable transformation requires embracing change without abandoning principles. It means knowing which playbooks to keep and which to rewrite.
The Forever Franchise isn't just a strategy for games; it's a strategy for careers, companies, and cultures. Yaron proved that by staying through all three eras, evolving with each one. Perhaps that's the real lesson: in an industry obsessed with explosive growth and viral hits, sustainability, not just scale, is the ultimate competitive advantage. The games that last aren't the ones that exploded fastest. They're the ones that understood what made players come back on day 890, not just day 1.
And maybe that's what Zynga finally figured out: you can't build franchises forever if you're not willing to think in forever timeframes yourself.
