[sriramk]

Great hire for Zynga. Don is hugely respected at Microsoft and was actually tipeed to be a potential Ballmer successor. Big loss for Microsoft.

[pyrocat]

"Let's take this guy who has been recently reviled by the gaming community and hire him at our company that has always been reviled by the gaming community! It's a perfect culture fit!"

[mtgx]

Interesting. It seems a lot of "potential Ballmer successors" have been let go from Microsoft in the past few years, from Ray Ozzie to Sinofsky, and now this one, too.

I wonder what this means for Zynga - more DRM?

[sriramk]

I don't this in the same vein. I think Don was well-liked all around.

[runevault]

Did that hold up after the One debacle that lead to a total about face? And he was at least part of it, with comments like "if you can't take advantage of the xbox one, we have a solution for you. The xbox 360" (not exact wording but you get the point).

I could very much imagine the whole mess costing him a lot within MS and leading to him looking to go somewhere else and start over.

[theseanstewart]

It means you're going to be forced to use the front facing camera on the iPhone in order to play games.

[wilfra]

There is no more certain path to an early retirement from Microsoft than being perceived as a threat to Steve Ballmer for the CEO job.