Zynga, the makers of popular social games Farmville and Café World, has set up a studio in Bangalore for game development.
The San Francisco-based company set shop in India a year ago to store and manage the growing amounts of data across users playing Zynga games. Now, the India team (in Bangalore) will also be involved in creating new features for Zynga's existing set of games.
The company currently has 100 people in Bangalore. This year, Zynga plans to double the headcount. Mr Shan Kadavil, Country Manager, Zynga India, said, “Last year our focus in India was ‘Membase' – an open source data base that manages growing data and we hired several technology experts and computer scientists. This year we are looking at development of game features. We will continue to hire computer scientists but will also look at creative talent from the animation, gaming and Bollywood industries.”
Zynga plans to hire from top tier engineering colleges such as the IIT, apart from lateral hires from product companies.
There are 250 million people who play Zynga games each month. Around 50 million are daily users. In India alone, Zynga has 1.5 million daily users, with 30 per cent of them being women. Recently, Zynga organised a ‘fan event' for users of Zynga games in Bangalore.
While Zynga games are played free of cost, the company makes money through sale of virtual goods. It also sells game cards at 5 lakh retail outlets across India and South East Asia.
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