Zynga is seeking legal remedy with Alan Patmore, a former executive for the company. The social game publisher is accusing Patmore of stealing trade secrets.

The company alleges that Patmore had 760 internal files on his DropBox account, later uninstalling the cloud service account from his computer the next day and leaving the company. Zynga brought in forensic experts, who say he engaged in wrongful conduct.

Patmore is now employed at Kixeye, a place that announced that it had hired him less than a week after departing Zynga. Patmore allegedly took with him the company’s formula for analyzing social games as well as internal assessments on the success and failures of previous games, along with a road map for future projects, all of which could be potentially useful to a rival like Kixeye

“The data Patmore took from Zynga could be used to improve a competitor’s internal understanding and know-how of core game mechanics and monetization and core game mechanics,” Zynga said, adding of its rival, “Kixeye has failed to achieve success in the online free-to-play gaming market because it lacks Zynga’s know-how concerning how to develop sought-after games, and effectively monetize within those games on a mass scale.”

Kixeye for its part said it is not a part of the lawsuit. “Unfortunately, this appears to be Zynga’s new employee retention strategy: Suing former employees to scare current employees into staying,” said Kixeye in a statement. “They’ve clearly exhausted other options in their employee retention playbook.”

There was also increasing speculation that Zynga will buy back all of its stock with Zynga CEO Mark Pincus retweeting an analysis for Softech VC Charles Hudson to do just that.

“There are really interesting opportunities available to Zynga – they’re just too risky to do as a public company. There is a lot of greenfield opportunity in front of Zynga,” said Hudson. “Social casino, both for-fun and real money, are both still markets that can be contested with good products and smart marketing spend. There are interesting opportunities in midcore and hardcore mobile games. And very few companies have really cracked social distribution. All of the segments I’ve mentioned above are speculative – they haven’t settled out yet and there’s still a lot of work to do to figure out what it takes to win. Winning in these market spaces will take experimentation, testing, and will inevitably involve some failure. That sounds more like work to do in private than in public.”

“Zynga is in the midst of managing a really difficult platform transition – this is really hard to do as a public company regardless of what industry you’re in,” Hudson continued. “This is not just a games issue. Look at all of the traditional commerce companies that have tried to compete with e-commerce. And all of the print and analog media companies in music and news that have struggled to cope with the transition to digital. One thing is clear to me – fundamental distribution and platform transitions are hard enough to do – doing them in the glare of being a public company is downright impossible.”

“The reason is simple – public companies are measured quarterly and these kinds of transitions require quarters of hard work to effect. Zynga, and just about every knowledgeable analyst that covers the company, understands that the future is in mobile. Making that transition from a Facebook-centric world to one where they have a meaningful contribution on mobile will take time and that’s hard to do in public,” he concluded.

Source: CVG {link no longer active}