Zynga continues making moves. After opening an L.A. studio, signing a deal with Microsoft to bring its titles to MSN Games, and acquiring social gaming competitor Serious Business, today the company announced the opening of its first international office in India. Zynga India in Bangalore will be Zynga's first location outside the U.S. This complements Zynga's studios in San Francisco, Baltimore and L.A.
The company said that the India operation will "focus on game and large-scale infrastructure development." India was chosen because online gaming in the region has been rapidly expanding. Zynga cited research from Internet & Mobile Association of India, which states that 41% of active Internet users played online games in 2008, which is up 89% from the previous year. Moreover, India has over 81 million Internet users and is projected to become the third largest online market behind China and the U.S. by 2013. Zynga's domination of Facebook gaming with social games such as FarmVille, Mafia Wars, Café World, and FishVille should fit perfectly with the online surge in India.
“Social gaming combines the best of web technical talent with game storytelling,” said Zynga CEO Mark Pincus. “India offers some of the world’s most sophisticated and rich technical talent bases and we are thrilled to have a local presence.”
Zynga India said it's currently looking to recruit computer scientists and engineers who are experienced in building scalable infrastructure.
Update: According to VentureBeat, Zynga India will hire about 100 people. Zynga has about 800 people currently.
2 Comments
February 26, 2010
Great news :)
June 18, 2010
Good luck in Bangalore! We had an office very close to this Zynga office. We were kind of across from the Tibetan Hotel and near the Pizza Hut. Our developers were moving to other companies after just 3-5 months of working. They would jump ship for a $200 raise and then would come back to us asking for their old job because we had a better environment, including 2 free meals from a restaurant just down the street!
We have since learned our lesson and moved our India office to GOA. Everyone warned us that we would never get good developers as everyone wanted to work in bigger cities. Well 1 year later we have had only a few people leave and were up to 78 developers now and growing. What we learned was partly from our other offices in China. Keep away from the big cities and base out of tourist beach cities for much less attrition of workers.
We do recruit directly out of Bangalore and Hyderabad BTW so the talent pool is not coming from GOA.
Bangalore, Hyderabad, etc. all nightmare cities!!!
Also very difficult to get Westerners to live in big cities. Zynga will go through some serious pains!