Years ago, pundits wondered if Zynga would become the Google of games. Now it's starting to look more like Pets.com: the Wall Street Journal reports that the Zynga's quarterly losses are up nearly 84,000 percent from last year.

Zynga learned the hard way that relying on one hit game would kill a company if the farm ever went arid. Now King Digital is proving to be another disastrous one-hit wonder with their increasingly unpopular game Candy Crush Saga.

Former CEO Mark Pincus just stepped down from all his operational duties at Zynga, which went public at $10/share and is now trading at $4.60. "Ultimately a ship is better with one captain," he said. Especially if that captain chucked so many sailors overboard.

Today Zynga announced plans to lay off 15 percent of its staff, which amounts to about 314 employees. This follows massive layoffs last June, during which more than 500 employees lost their jobs. But Zynga can't stop trying to buy its way out of trouble.

When the White House invite list for "top tech executives" got out yesterday, a few names stood out for the wrong reason. What would former Zynga CEO Mark Pincus, who stepped down in July after layoffs, a stock price free fall, shuttered games and a exodus of executives add to a discussion Healthcare.gov and NSA surveillance?

Yesterday, Zynga's lawyers threatened the hook-up app Bang with Friends with a trademark lawsuit. Since then Zynga sources have been whispering that the publicly-traded time bomb has tried to resolve the issue "amicably" for months. But Bang with Friends CEO Colin Hodge vehemently denied that claim.

Zynga, the failing company behind games you used to play like Draw Something and Words With Friends, is getting desperate as it falters: Bloomberg reports the firm is taking silly sex app Bang With Friends to court for trademark infringement.

The FarmVille dust bowl continues. Today the company announced that the number of people playing its games is rapidly shrinking: "Daily active users were...down to 39 million from 72 million a year ago, and monthly uniques declined to 123 million from 193 million," says Kara Swisher.

This is how you get someone to take a job nobody else wants: AllThingsD reports that incoming Zynga chief Don Mattrick will scoop up "about $50 million in cash and stock compensation over several years." That buys a lot of virtual cows.

The east coast presence of Zynga, that once-proud and mighty maker of tractor simulators, has been decimated—but it looks like it's not completely gone. Yet. A skeleton crew of doomed software refugees is sticking around Zynga's Manhattan turf, given the terrible "choice" between staying on longer or forfeiting their full termination packages.

A few game-makers who got the axe on Monday have already recovered—enough to dish on Reddit, at least. They're answering questions right now—and talking severance packages, game theft, and of course, corporate perks.

While Zynga was busy laying off 520 employees without warning yesterday, including most of his officemates, Zynga's newly hired VP of mobile ad strategy Timothy Price piped up on Facebook to assure his friends that he wasn't one of 18 percent.

Zynga's gargantuan purchase of OMGPOP, that company that made briefly mega-popular Draw Something, will now be an icon of tech collapse. Only slightly over a year after impulse-spending $200 million on the small company, Zynga is killing it.

It's easy to mock Zynga right now as it starts to grip its stomach and collapse—but where were the skeptics before the IPO boom and bust? Too busy heaping praise on a company that sold virtual hay bales on Facebook—and it sure looks bad in retrospect.

AllThingsD's Kara Swisher says Zynga is on the verge of massive layoffs, as a bad year gets worse for the bleeding FarmVille firm. Maybe selling virtual castles is no longer a $7 billion business. Update: Zynga confirms layoffs.

It can't be easy to work at Zynga, a fallen star whose games are out outmoded and share price is slipping. I guess one day you wake up and just decide, Fuck it, today will be the day I organized a footrace through NYC traffic.

As part of Zynga's new "austerity," the company is fixating on its Farmville franchise. "It could be the Seinfeld of our era in gaming, a multi-season show that has a quality and a consistency that you can rely on," said Mark Pincus. That, or show about nothing that ended horribly.

Zynga, cruising on the highway to BrokeVille, is banking on its newest ripoff of Pictionary to be as wildly popular as the first one. Banking so heavily, in fact, that the company is just shamelessly getting famous people to feign interest on Twitter. Ryan Seacrest: diehard iPhone artist.

More bad news for everyone's least favorite social gaming company: the FarmVille empire's former prince is AWOL, right on the heels of his hyped new release.

Earnings numbers are in for Facebook playground Zynga, and holy cow, they're profitable even post-IPO disaster. But under the surface, they're dying. Quickly. People are fleeing FarmVille by the millions.