Zynga Enters Asia With Acquisition Of Gaming Startup XPD Media; Opens Office In Beijing
This is Zynga’s fourth acquisition over the past two year (that’s been made public, that is); the company previously bought YoVille, Serious Business, and My Mini Life. For Zynga, the acquisition represents the company’s initial foray into the Asian gaming market, which is rapidly growing. One of Zynga’s biggest competitors, Playfish, already has an office in China. The deal is more of a talent acquisition and less of a userbase acquisition—XPD Media has a number of talented developers and and engineers, and Zynga is planning in hiring on hiring a CTO, HR manager and software engineers in the new office.
Currently, Zynga does not have any games on any Asian social networks. Zynga would not elaborate on its future international or game localization plans involving XPD Media.
As Sarah Lacy wrote in her report yesterday, the entry of Zynga and other Silicon Valley gaming companies into China differs from Yahoo, eBay, and Google round expanding into China, because there are a host of Chinese publicly-traded gaming competitors that already have a strong place in the arena like Tencent and Shanda.
And this also means that there will be more competition from gaming talent in China and Chinese startups may not be so happy about that. But we’ve heard from more than a few sources that there’s trouble in paradise with Google’s Beijing staff after the search giant threatened its pull-out of the market earlier this year, so perhaps Zynga will be able to poach talent from this office.
This has been a big week for Zynga. The social gaming giant just entered a five-year partnership with Facebook, amidst rumors that Zynga was leaving the social network partially due to Facebook’s policies over its virtual currency, Credits. But all is well–for now, at least. Zynga says that this will be a big summer for the company, and will continue to focus on building our its own independent business. Clearly that business will have an international angle.