Zynga: The advent of social Gaming

Zynga is to Social gaming what Google and Facebook are to Search and Social networking. In partnership with Facebook, Zynga has metamorphosed into the largest internet social gaming platform. Facebook and Zynga have a symbiotic relationship. While Facebook provides Zynga the scale in terms of its 500 million account holders, Zynga provides the stickiness to Facebook usage. Together, Facebook and Zynga are now instrumental in staging out the first global virtual currency, the Facebook Credits. Zynga, based in San Francisco, is the largest maker of games on Facebook, and is expected to record revenue of as much as $500 million this year, according to Inside Network. Zynga has more than 200 million monthly active users, with between 1 percent and 3 percent paying for virtual items.

In a Tech Crunch event, Disrupt, Internet Evangelist and Investor, Bing Gordon, who founded gaming giant Electronic Arts prior to joining KPCB, recalled what made him think that Zynga would be a massive success. Gordon said that, years ago, he anticipated that there would be four disruptive trends in the game industry: social, analytics, an “APIable Internet” (app economy), and new payment methods. But he’d previously thought of each of these as separate entities, not something that would be combined into a single company. Then he saw what Mark Pincus was onto with Zynga — which he says combined these “four disruptions in one”.

Mark Pincus, CEO Zynga, in the same event, stated that Zynga is still far from being an Internet treasure, at least in the way he defines one. The way he defines an internet treasure is about adding a new meaning to the “daily grind” of the lives of the users. I suspect if that be the statement, Pincus has more on his mind then just the farming games to “add a new meaning to the daily grind of the lives of the users”.

As of Today, Zynga is a part of a new concept that is starting to take wings: Virtal Goods. The U.S. virtual-goods market may grow more than 30 percent in 2011 as games on consoles and mobile devices replicate the success of applications on Facebook Inc. The market will jump to $2.1 billion next year from $1.6 billion in 2010 and $1.1 billion in 2009, as quoted by Inside Network. Companies such as Nintendo and Ngcomo are following suit after Zynga added the new dimension to virtual goods on social games. The objective is to get more and more engaged users into paying for virtual goods. Social Gaming now accounts 40% of the virtual goods market with Zynga, Electronic Arts and Walt Disney Co making up half of the social gaming market for next year.

Online Gaming In India
Online gaming in India is rapidly expanding. Forty one percent of active Internet users played online games in 2008, up 89 percent from the previous year, according to the Internet & Mobile Association of India. With more than 81 million Internet users, India is projected to become the third largest online market behind China and the U.S. by 2013.