Social game maker Zynga, whose titles include the hugely popular FarmVille, CityVille and FrontierVille Facebook games, is looking to take its first big step outside the giant social network’s walls in a deal with Chinese social site Tencent.
The San Francisco-based developer is looking to release a version of its CityVille game, albeit one customised for the local market, on Tencent’s Pengyou and QZone social services. QZone currently boasts around 480 million users, and is China’s largest social site.
The move is certainly a shrewd one on the part of Zynga, who have been so far unable to tap into the lucrative Chinese market due to Facebook’s absence from the country. Facebook, as well as Twitter and now Google+, is censored by the Chinese government and inaccessible in mainland China. Zynga are obviously keen to move into China where gaming is big business and microtransactions, through which they make money in their games, are already commonplace – QZone itself uses microtransactions to allow users to unlock additional features.
The game, which is being re-branded as Zynga City, is under development at the firm’s Beijing offices and will be available as a beta at some point this week.
If the game, currently Zynga’s most popular with around 80 million monthly users, can take off in China it could provide a huge boost in userbase for the firm. This move into another market will be Zynga’s biggest so far outside the Facebook ecosystem. While the firm has dabbled in other games beyond Facebook’s walls (such as Words with Friends on mobile devices) these still only account for a tiny percentage of overall revenue. A move into other markets is a sound financial move – as is proving they can make money outside Facebook.
