For some time now Zynga has been the big name in social games, but that may be changing. Before we talk about the substantial job cuts that the company is making however, lets begin by talking about the company itself, for those people who don’t spend their free time on Facebook playing games here is a look at how the company has chosen to describe itself, “Zynga Inc. (NASDAQ: ZNGA) is the world’s leading provider of social game services with more than 240 million monthly active users playing its games, which include CityVille, Zynga Poker, Draw Something, Hidden Chronicles, FarmVille, CastleVille, Words With Friends, Empires & Allies, Scramble With Friends, Café World, The Pioneer Trail, Indiana Jones™ Adventure World and Mafia Wars. Zynga’s games are available on a number of global platforms, including Facebook, Zynga.com, Google+, Tencent, Apple iOS and Google Android. Through Zynga.org, Zynga players have raised more than $10 million for world social causes.”

Earlier this week the company chose to cut back on about five percent of its workers, in a move designed to help the company cut back on costs. The layoffs have impacted workers in several US cities, including Austen, Chicago and Boston, though at this time it is not clear if the company has triggered a mass layoff action. For those of you who are not familiar with the idea of a mass layoff action here is a look at how the federal government defines the term, “The Mass Layoff Statistics (MLS) program collects reports on mass layoff actions that result in workers being separated from their jobs. Monthly mass layoff numbers are from establishments which have at least 50 initial claims for unemployment insurance (UI) filed against them during a 5-week period. Extended mass layoff numbers (issued quarterly) are from a subset of such establishments—where private sector nonfarm employers indicate that 50 or more workers were separated from their jobs for at least 31 days.”

In an update, put out on the Zynga Blog the CEO of the company outlined some of the changes that will come with the layoffs, which do include cutting several games from the company’s portfolio, “As part of these changes, we’ve had to make some tough decisions around products, teams and people.  I want to fill you in on what’s happened and address any concerns you may have. Here are the most important details. We are sunsetting 13 older games and we’re also significantly reducing our investment in The Ville. We are closing the Zynga Boston studio and proposing closures of the Zynga Japan and UK studios.  Additionally, we are reducing staffing levels in our Austin studio.  All of these represent terrific entrepreneurial teams, which make this decision so difficult.

In addition to these studios, we are also making a small number of partner team reductions. In all, we will unfortunately be parting ways with approximately 5% of our full time workforce.  We don’t take these decisions lightly as we recognize the impact to our colleagues and friends who have been on this journey with us.  We appreciate their amazing contributions and will miss them.”