Will it be a separate studio?

Yes. We want to leverage their knowhow, so we renamed it, but we will keep the team intact. They’ll continue to develop their own products.

Mobile is a huge opportunity. We have a huge user base to leverage, and we have really exciting IP. Stay tuned.

Let’s talk about the Android platform – what are your thoughts on that?

We want to connect the world through games, so we want to be on any device on any platform, but to also get the experience right. We’ve been focused on the iPhone and iPad primarily. We want to move to other platforms, you’ll see Mafia Wars for Android later this month for example.

What about Nokia, Windows Phone, Blackberry …?

Our goal is to understand the limitations of devices and go from there. We want to offer seamless experience everywhere on the planet.

You were at Yahoo for 10 years. Do you want to talk about the situation there right now, and your recent decision to leave?

I was at Yahoo for a little over 10 years, it was a great experience. I wish them all the best.

But you had a lot of responsibilities there … why leave all that to do only mobile at Zynga?

I’ve met Mark Pincus a couple of months ago, and I was always impressed with Zynga as a company. The more time I spent with Mark and the management team, the more I became impressed.

They don’t really have a strong mobile presence.

Yes, there are lots of opportunities right now. Zynga today has a huge subscriber base: 45 million daily active users yesterday for example.

There’s the huge Facebook association. As you move more into mobile and other sites … how important is that for Zynga?

We stand for being social, and the reality is Facebook equals social. But there are other users looking to access our service through other sites. So we take that into account, and we look for more partnerships in that regard.

What about Facebook and its own mobile strategy with Connect etcetera? Are you guys working with them?

There are things they’re doing we can leverage, so we want to look at how we can do that under the current partnership in place with Facebook.

Moving on to international markets. What’s the status on Zynga’s expansion outside the United States?

We just launched Farmville in Japan through one of our partners, Softbank, mobile-only to start with. We’re very excited to see how that goes. In Asia today, many folks will access the Web through mobile first, so that means we have to diversify away from the high-end smartphones, so we have a lot of work to do in that regard.

We just launched CityVille last week, and it’s been the fastest-growing game for us to date. We saw 3 million daily active users yesterday, and that’s across 5 different languages.

Zynga’s revenue numbers are growing fast, but mobile is a minuscule part of that, right?

We’re definitely just getting started on that level.

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Authors: Robin Wauters

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