The Farmville developer is apparently negotiating a deal with Google to be the cornerstone of its new game service.
While you might not have played a Zynga game yourself, it’s almost guaranteed that you know someone who has. With tens of millions of players around the world, Zynga’s games have incredible reach, something that Google is apparently trying to tap into with an injection of venture capital and a new strategic partnership.
Sources suggest that Google invested between $100 million to $200 million into the casual game developer, and is in talks to make games like Farmville and Mafia Wars a major part of a Google Games service, believed to be launching later this year. If such a partnership does happen – and it’s hard to see any reason why it wouldn’t – Google Games could become a very big player in social gaming very quickly, thanks to users coming from all of Google’s other services.
Zynga has made $350 million in revenue in the first part of this year, say sources, with around half of that being operating profit. Projections for 2011 suggest that Zynga expects revenues of over a billion dollars. The deal with Google is just part of nearly $500 million in venture capital raised in the last year.
Source: Techcrunch via Industry Gamers
