Zynga goes to China

This will be interesting to watch how it plays out, online gaming is one space China famously sets the stage.

“As a social game developer, Zynga fully recognizes the value of Tencent’s Open Platform and their professional service capability,” said Andy Tian, general manager of Zynga China.

“CityVille is Zynga’s largest and most popular game and Zynga is proud to partner with the leading open platform in China to bring the innovation and delight of the game to Chinese players. We are excited that a fully localized Zynga City will be introduced to the Chinese audience and look forward to enabling them to connect in a fun, harmonious way.”

Source: Telegraph

Moving to more mobile and social games

EA said the deal, which is expected to close by August this year, helps EA drive toward its goal of building a $1 billion digital business. “EA and PopCap are a compelling combination,” said EA CEO John Riccitiello in a statement. “PopCap’s great studio talent and powerful IP add to EA’s momentum.” …

This shows that the traditional gaming world is quickly evolving and give credit to EA for getting out ahead of this curve. Riccitiello has been preaching this transition for years and is now putting the pieces in place to take advantage of the evolution of gaming, which is moving away from big packaged titles into more bite-sized mobile and social games.

Source: gigaom

"When you make your game free and add in-app purchases, two powerful things can happen: first, more people will likely try your game since you’ve made the “ante” zero; and second, you will likely take more total money, since different players can now spend different amounts depending on their engagement and preferences."

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Amazing Rise of Zynga

Innovation and creative destruction in plain site?

The danger for EA is that froth has a way of becoming real; Zynga’s higher potential valuation means that the market views Zynga as the future and EA as the past. Zynga is expected to be even more valuable than Activision Blizzard, the largest video game company, which has a $13.5 billion valuation. Again, that’s crazy, considering Activision Blizzard’s strength in online gaming via World of Warcraft. To truly earn its place as the world’s most valuable game company, Zynga will have to live up to its tradition of being a disruptor.

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Zynga Scale: One Petabyte Of Content Per Day

Our physical network infrastructure utilizes a mixture of our own datacenters and public cloud datacenters linked with high-speed networking. We utilize commodity hardware, and our architecture is designed for high availability and fault tolerance while accommodating the demands of social game play.

We have developed our architecture to work effectively in a flexible cloud environment that has a high degree of elasticity. For example, our automatic provisioning tools have enabled us to add up to 1,000 servers in a 24-hour period in response to game demand. We operate at a scale that routinely delivers more than one petabyte of content per day. We intend to invest in and use more of our own infrastructure going forward, which we believe will provide us with an even better cost profile and position us to further drive operating leverage.

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