The social game giant who owns Facebook’s Farmville and mobile fads like Draw Something and Words With Friends has watched their stock deflate rapidly in the past few trade days. Just a couple of possible reasons for the recent tailspin: dwindling interest in previous games from mobile players and Facebook fallout, not to meantion over-speculation and poorer games. Looks like capitalizing on the zombie-media trends with Zombie Swipeout wasn’t the flawless escape it promised to be in the conference room. 

Shares of Zynga stock have been on a rollercoaster ever since the Facebook IPO. Just like its bigger brother, it’s not a pretty picture – Zynga dipped below $5 today, down 50% from its IPO price of $10.

There’s no reason why Zynga stock should go down proportionally along with Facebook – as I’ve said before, social games are a rare bright spot in Facebook’s otherwise murky monetization landscape. But the social gaming giant has problems of its own.

There are a lot of reasons why Zynga has trouble – too much reliance on Facebook, less dominance on the mobile platform, traffic drops in popular games, and more. But at the end of the day, Zynga has found itself in the entertainment business. It needs hits, and it needs them badly – the old games won’t last forever, and it has yet to create something to match the buzz of the its earlier titles. Zynga knows how to sell games hard enough to get a few million daily users for each new title, but it struggles with getting those users to stick around for as long as they have with previous titles.

[via Forbes]