Zynga co-founder and CEO Mark Pincus had just ten minutes to talk at Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco but he used his time efficiently to bring us up to speed on Zynga:
- ten major games
- 13 studios
- six countries
- 1300 employees
- six acquisitions in six months
- 400 people on new intellectual property (IP)
- 320 million users
He also added that users have formed around 650,000 same-sex marriages on FrontierVille, the first project developed by Zynga East (in Baltimore).
Going forward, Pincus says Zynga is working on what he’s calling a “dog-activated” gaming network, named after the dog in the company logo. The idea is to reduce friction for players and increase payoff to the point where some people don’t even need to play the game.
Right now, Zynga sees over three million users playing its games concurrently at peak times and, at any given moment, four of your friends are playing those games. Pincus envisions Zynga games tapping into this core base of loyal users by posting game updates or sharing interesting mechanics with users not playing the game.
After talking about “dog-activation,” Pincus concluded his talk by touching briefly on brand influence in the changing mobile space by likening certain brands to a dial tone, something the user just naturally understands and accepts. Facebook is poised to become (if it isn’t already) the social dial tone, Pandora is the radio dial tone and Zynga wants to be the social gaming dial tone.
“It’s not going to be about points of control, but about user control,” said Pincus.
He foresees brands settling into every consumer-facing industry.
