Zynga Rakes in Revenues Exceeding $1 Billion in 2011
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Zynga has created its own personal CashVille by making over $1.14 billion dollars in 2011.
This dramatic rise in revenue has stemmed from a significant rise in gamers who are playing Zynga titles on mobile devices as well as wasting their employers’ time playing at their desktop during office hours.
54 million people worldwide now play Zynga games every day, with a sizeable portion opting to pay for additional premium content on offer for the majority of the titles. This allows them to either progress through the game faster, or unlocks special bonuses and items to be used for either gameplay or aesthetic purposes.
The purchasing of virtual currency to be used in these games – as well as other non-gaming products in the case of Facebook credits – continues to rise as the range of available products grows. The increase access to the games through mobile devices has also surely helped encourage further investment in virtual currency as players now rack up more playing time while on the move.
It seems that while Zynga’s IPO on the stock market didn’t match expectations, the company is still making money hand-over-fist, further validating the micro-transactions model.
However, it’s not all sunshine and wide cartoony smiles for Zynga. There remain fears that the social games developers has made the mistake of promoting too wide a range of titles too rapidly, meaning that the new games simply have not built up as much of a user base as Zynga’s older smash hits, such as the infamously polarizing FarmVille and later CityVille.
Despite the failure of the newer titles to grow as much as older Zynga titles, the new games have helped fuel the rapid rise in revenue over the course of the last year. This suggests that although player growth may be slower, there are still significantly more players who have been converted into actual paying customers.
