Zynga files for IPO

By Aemon Malone Published July 1, 2011

As we expected, Zynga, the force behind the popular Facebook games FarmVille and CityVille, has filed paperwork for its initial public offering. Reports indicate that the move could raise as much as $1 billion for the company that also has developed a lineup of popular mobile games.

Zynga joins a recent wave of tech companies that are going public. In May, the professional networking site LinkedIn completed a highly successful IPO that saw the company earning big money for its pre-IPO investors. The music streaming site Pandora followed LinkedIn’s lead in June by completing its own IPO, which it had initially filed for back in February.

Zynga’s IPO comes at an auspicious time for the gaming company. In February, the Zynga was valued at a whopping $10 billion — more than double its valuation from a year prior. And following an IPO, Zynga’s value could rise as high as $20 billion. For perspective, consider that gaming giant EA’s most recent valuation was placed at around $5 billion.

In its IPO paperwork. Zynga cited its growing user base, currently put at 60 million active users, and its impressive 2010 revenue of $597 million as motivators behind its decision to move forward with a public offering. Zynga’s profitability combined with its legion of fans all but assures that investors will look favorably on the company as it moves into the public realm.

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Gaming

PlayStation spent 2023 setting up dominoes. But will they fall in 2024?

A PS5 sits on a table.

2023 has already become a strong contender for the best year in gaming ever (at least when it comes to newly released games), but we've yet to see how it'll be remembered for PlayStation long-term. It currently stands as an experimental year filled with massive gambles that we won't see the results of until 2024 at the earliest.

From an outside perspective, 2023 might've seemed like PlayStation was resting on its laurels. With more hit third-party releases than most people could reasonably handle hitting on a near monthly cadence, the average PlayStation fan was likely content with "just" the utterly fantastic Marvel's Spider-Man 2 from the first-party side. In reality, this year Sony has set up a series of dominoes that, depending on how they fall, could very well determine its future -- for better or worse. Even though a few of its efforts are trending in the wrong direction, or at least have the community concerned, there's no turning the ship now.
Heavy on hardware
Sony put out more hardware this year than perhaps any other year in its history. We started off with the PlayStation VR2, got the surprise slim models of the PS5, the PlayStation Portal most recently, and will close out the year with its impressive Adaptive Controller. Of those, PSVR2 is the largest dice roll the company is currently watching play out. VR, in general, still only caters to a niche audience, and for as powerful and cutting-edge as the tech inside Sony's headset really is, that small audience is automatically cut by being tied to the PS5 install base willing to pay another massive entry fee. Despite all the cards stacked against it, Sony could pull an ace from its sleeve to justify the entire experiment: first-party games.

Gaming

I’m a lifelong Sonic fan. Here’s why I’m loving Sonic Dream Team

Sonic Dream Team key art with Sonic the Hedgehog, Amy Rose, Cream the Rabbit, Knuckles the Echidna, Rouge the Bat, Miles “Tails” Prower, and Ariem in the background.

When I was 9 years old, shortly after my cousin reintroduced me to Sonic Adventure 2: Battle on the GameCube, I had a dream that triggered my love for Sonic forever once I woke up. In that dream, Eggman kidnapped me for some heinous purpose, encasing me in a capsule for a weapon that could potentially destroy the planet. The details of that dream are fuzzy -- most dreams are -- but I recall Sonic rushing in to defeat Eggman and rescue me, putting an end to his evil plans once and for all.

Twenty years later, the trailer for Sonic Dream Team caught me by surprise with visuals reminiscent of Sonic Lost World and animated sequences (including a full opening cinematic, complete with Eggman having multiple arms just like the spider guy from Spirited Away) by none other than Sonic illustrator Tyson Heese. The title alone reminded me of the dream my 9-year-old self had so much, and I got the chance to relive it with my iPhone plugged into my Backbone controller (an experience I highly recommend, by the way).

Gaming

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Basim perched on a ledge overlooking Baghdad

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"Players can be excited about some remakes, which will allow us to revisit some of the games we've created in the past and modernize them," he says, implying that it could pertain to games made before Odyssey. "There are worlds in some of our older Assassin's Creed games that are still extremely rich."