Zynga
More info
- Creator
- Mark Pincus et al.
- Released
- 2007
- Owner
- Take-Two Interactive (since 2022)
- Type
- Game developer
The company behind FarmVille, which for a few years turned the Facebook news feed into a stream of requests to water someone's crops.
Mark Pincus named the company after his bulldog, Zinga. When Facebook opened its platform to third-party apps in 2007, Zynga was quickest to exploit it: the games were free, but went faster if you paid or pestered your friends for help, and every bit of pestering showed up in the feed. At its peak FarmVille (2009) had over 80 million monthly players.
Facebook tightened the rules on game notifications, and growth stalled at roughly the same moment as the 2011 IPO. The $180 million purchase of OMGPOP in 2012 became a textbook case: Draw Something was shedding players within weeks of the deal. Zynga moved to mobile and was bought by Take-Two in 2022 for $12.7 billion. Its tricks — friend-spam, energy meters — live on in almost every free-to-play game.