Zynga Aims to Conquer World

Zynga isn’t sitting still on its new-found $10 billion valuation.

Instead, like another nouveau riche private Web shop, Groupon, the digital-gaming company, has its sites set on major growth outside the United States. But while coupon site Groupon is hiring for an expansion into China, Zynga is focusing on much of the rest of the world.

The creator of Farmville, Cityville, and other popular games largely connected to the Facebook ecosystem is launching Cityville in new languages and has cut a deal to make payment for goods in its games more friendly to audiences in Latin America.

Zynga has cut a deal with another gaming company, Mentez, to sell prepaid cards throughout Latin America that can then be used to buy virtual goods for Zynga’s games.

It’s a key move if Zynga wants to open the markets south of the U.S. border, VentureBeat reports. That’s because there’s an avid social-gaming culture in Latin America. But those gamers, unlike their North American counterparts, are hesitant to whip out credit cards to buy virtual gaming goods. Instead, they prefer prepaid cards.

And while Zynga is cutting a deal to make playing its games more consumer friendly in both Americas, the company is also looking to expand its universe of game players by introducing at least one in new languages.

Zynga announced today that it would add Turkish and Indonesian to the languages in which users can play Cityville. That move could unlock two growing markets, including the largest Muslim country, Indonesia.

As the company says in a release:

Indonesian and Turkish are more language firsts for Zynga and are important markets for the company as it expands internationally. Building from the global success of Cityville, an increased number of players around the world will now be able to play the game in their native languages.

Cityville has more than 20 million daily players worldwide with a large percentage of people playing the game each day in French, Italian, German, or Spanish languages, which were included in the game’s global launch in December 2010. Both Indonesian and Turkish are among the top 5 languages on Facebook and continue to grow at a tremendous pace.

Zynga is one of the big success stories in the sphere of social networking. The San Francisco company is profitable, and the New York Times reported last week it was talking with mutual fund giants T. Rowe Price and Fidelity Investments about a new round of funding in the neighborhood of $500 million.

That latest round would place Zynga’s value at $10 billion and would be aimed toward an initial public offering in early 2012.

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Kent Bernhard Jr. is News Editor of Portfolio.com