games

Zynga, the social gaming behemoth, is starting a creative studio in India to conceptualise and develop games for global markets, and plans to double its staff here as well. Zynga Studio-I will be the company’s largest office outside the United States and will be based in the company’s office in Bangalore. Back in February 2010, Zynga opened its office in Bangalore. At that time, social gaming on Facebook was undergoing quick growth in the country and the company estimated 81 million internet users in India and anticipated it to become the third largest market, behind the US and China, by 2013. Zynga’s Indian office has around 100 employees who are focused on developing infrastructure and key technologies for an open-source database application — Membase — which supports the company’s growing user base. Zynga plans to hire 100 new employees for Studio-I and about half them would be game developers who will be responsible for developing new features for about eight current games from Zynga including Vampire Wars, YoVille and FishVille, according to Shan Kadavil, Zynga’s manager for India. The company is also adding people from other profiles — creative talent and senior management — besides engineering. This is important as the new studio will be taking full ownership from a profit and loss standpoint for the eight games, from conceptualisation to gameplay mechanics, implementation, development and online marketing. In the future, Studio I might develop entirely new games as well, added Kadavil. Dhimant Vyas, who designed the title sequence for the Bollywood film, Taare Zameen Par has been hired as creative director. Zynga’s plan to set up the creative studio in India will also be highly conducive for the country’s economy, to be more specific the IT industry. Currently Zynga has nearly 1500 employees worldwide. Although, the Indian office will have only 200 employees, we can expect the number to grow further looking at the rate which the company is growing. The company is planning to launch games which people can play on mobile devices and has already been rolling out mobile versions of its popular titles. So, the Indian IT hub is now going to get the taste of game development as well. Zynga, is the first amongst the popular web-startups to actually start a development centre in India. Previously, in August 2010, Facebook opened its offices in Hyderabad, which is only responsible for providing advertising and sales support to software pros sitting at its headquarters in Palo Alto. Like Facebook, the web giant, Google also has an office in Hyderabad which provides support for Adwords writing and quality rating services for clients and has recently started providing support for Adsense clients as well. So, both Google and Facebook’s offices in Hyderabad are only there for accelerating their sales in India and not for any core development. This makes Zynga’s move to Indian an even bigger news — The social gaming startup does not want to exploit India by starting a BPO but wants to add value by setting up a creative studio. Couple of weeks back Zynga made another move in the Indian market. Along with organising meet-ups for its fans, the company also launched Zynga Game Cards in association with MOL AccessPortal Berhad. These card will provide an easy way for players to pay for virtual goods. Although this move might not work in their favour, it shows that they are looking at India as a growing market and want to experiment with it. Of the 25 million users which Zynga has worldwide, 0.6 percent of them are Indian. Though this isn’t an impressive figure, Zynga’s market in India is rapidly expanding. Just a year back, there were hardly users, who heard about this gaming leviathan and now one and a half million Indians play those games daily. Looking For A Social Media Agency? CLICK HERE! Related Posts Will Women Drive The Future Of The Internet? Recap 2010 : Social Networking Yahoo Axes About 600 Jobs! Nokia To Follow Suit? Yahoo! Adds Daily Deals, Rich Search Assist and Zynga’s Games To Messenger Now Update Your Friend’s List On Facebook From Gmail, Orkut!