How do you say “Farmville” in Japanese?
Zynga, maker of the popular social game, wants to find out.
To do so, the San Francisco company is entering into a joint venture with Softbank to develop and distribute games in Japan. As part of the deal, Softbank is investing $150m in Zynga, and will help launch the new business unit, Zynga Japan, in Tokyo.
Details of the partnership are scarce, but it will be interesting to see how Zynga’s games go over in Japan, a difficult market for foreign companies to crack. The deal also brings social gaming, which originated in Asian markets, full circle.
This is the latest bullish move from the social games leader. It was only months ago that Zynga took $180m from a group including Andreessen Horowitz and Digital Sky Technologies, the Russian group which owns a major stake in Facebook.
Since then, Zynga has partnered with Yahoo, launched another hit game on Facebook (that would be Frontierville), and mended its frayed relationship with Facebook.
But there was no mention of any relationship between Zynga and Google in tonight’s last-minute release. Google is said to have invested about $150m in Zynga last month as well, and is rumoured to be developing its own platform for social games.
If the Google investment is true, that brings Zynga’s total funds raised to as much as $500m, a huge amount for a private tech startup (especially one with low capital costs that is said to mint cash, as Business Insider points out).
Plenty of that is going towards paying for Zynga’s more than 1,000 employees (and giving early employees some liquidity).
But coming just a day after rival social game maker Playdom got snapped up by Disney, and months after rival Playfish was bought by Electronic Arts, it looks like Zynga is also looking to extend its runway, quite literally buying time as it waits for the public markets to open up.
