14 DAY TRIAL // Zynga is one of the hottest companies around and can already be considered huge, in terms of users. CEO Mark Pincus talked briefly at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco and gave an idea of where the company is headed next.
Zynga, the biggest social gaming company on the web, wants to become more than just a game maker, it wants Zynga to be a unifying platform, in the same sense that Facebook is.
At this point, 320 million people have played a Zynga game at least once. While Zynga games are not only available on Facebook, the social network is the main way users play and discover games like FrontierVille and Mafia Wars.
With over 500 million Facebook users, it's safe to say that around half of them have played a Zynga game at one point. And it's not an one time thing, there have been more than three million users playing at the same time.
In fact, Pincus said with some confidence that, on average, at least 4 of your friends of family members are playing a Zynga game at any given time.
The company is growing as well. Zynga employs 1,300 people in 13 studios located in six countries. It has also been expanding, acquiring six companies in the past six months alone.
Zynga is said to be on track to make $500 million in revenue this year and has raised about as much from various high profile investors, including Google, SoftBank, Andreessen Horowitz and Russia's DST, now Mail.ru Group.
Zynga has 400 employees working on new IP, but it has even bolder plans. Zynga wants to become as ubiquitous as Facebook, or as Pincus said it, the "dial tone" of social gaming.
Users should always be connected, even if they aren't playing anything at one point they should be able to make social connections via Zynga, Pincus believes.