What is Zynga?
Zynga is a relatively new player in the gaming industry with its founding in 2007. But since its founding, Zynga has grown to be one of the most popular, innovative, and successful gaming companies. It has its headquarters in San Francisco, California in the USA and develops mostly browser games. These browser-based games have stand-alone versions but may also be offered as an application in popular social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook.

Zynga’s founders are Mark Pincus, Kyle Stewart, John Doerr, and Scott Sale. They also had Bing Gordon of Electronic Arts as part of their board. The name “zynga” is taken from the name of a bulldog formerly owned by Mark Pincus. They also used a “bulldog” as part of their company logo. Over the years, Zynga has grown bigger and bigger, acquiring other gaming companies, and opening offices in different parts of the world. By 2010, the company already had more than 1,200 employees and opened its first office outside of the US. This first overseas office is located in India. Many of their acquisitions included YoVille, Challenge Games, Bonfire Studios, Newtoy Inc., Area/Code, and MarketZero.

Zynga also became widely popular because of the game “Farmville” offered as a gaming application to millions of Facebook users around the globe. Despite some problems regarding “Facebook credits” in the past, Zynga is able to sign a 5-year deal with the people behind Facebook to expand the use of Facebook credits in Farmville and other Zynga games.

And along with Zynga’s great success in the gaming world, so are the controversies. There are complaints that some of their games have some spam-like features. A typical example is Farmville wherein gamers can make gift-requests to non-gamers, which annoys the latter. Zynga has also been accused of copying the concepts of other games into their own games. Lawsuits were filed here and there, but today Zynga continues to become a strong player in the gaming industry.