BANGALORE: Social networking game provider Zynga has forayed into India with the launch of Zynga Game Network India.

Zynga’s first facility outside the US, the office will be based in Bangalore and will focus on game development and large scale infrastructure to support the delivery of Zynga games.

“Initially we plan to hire about 100 best of breed computer scientists and engineers over the next year for our first international facility,” said Zynga India country manager Shan Kadavil.

"Our focus will be on building the next generation infrastructure that can handle the tremendous growth of Zynga games. We plan to building game studios that can do end-to-end game development in India,” he added.
 
The company says that though most game players play for free, 3 to 5 per cent of the users actually pay to play games. Some of the paying players pay for ‘extra turns’, while others pay for exclusive virtual items and collecting. The desire to spend by the paying players is driven by what Zynga terms as ‘Social capital’.

Zynga CTO Cader Lee revealed that virtual goods were a better revenue generation model than an advertisement based one.

Zynga revealed that according to Think Equity LLC estimates in March 2009, for the five top daily developers, daily actual users’ size had grown by five times over the preceding six months. The top 20 of the 25 applications on Facebook were games as compared to six months before that when 16 games were among the top 50 applications of social networking sites. 
 
Zynga Chief People Officer Colleen McCureary revealed that social networking gaming had a potential to grow to a size of around $10-12 billion over the next two years and estimates the number of social networking game users to grow to around 500 million this year.

Zynga’s has a bouquet of 20 online games currently and plans to launch four more games shortly. Its games are available on Facebook, Myspace, MSM games, Tagged, Yahoo and iPhone include FarmVille, Zynga Poker, Mafia Wars, Café World, FishVille and Petville.