Competing with Facebook, which has 500 million active members, is more complicated for the historical actors of the Web. The Internet giants are addressing one of the pillars of its success, the online gaming community oriented, "Social gaming", which Farmville is the most important representative. First application on Facebook with over 59.6 million active players per month on the famous social network (and 230 million total), Farmville is published by Zynga, a U.S. start-up founded in 2007. In recent weeks, the latter fuels the greed of major Internet groups.

At the end of last week, the Japanese telecoms group Softbank and formalized an investment of 150 million dollars in Zynga.It is accompanied by the creation of Zynga Japan as a joint venture, whose aim is to convert users of the Archipelago to the "social gaming" while Zynga benefit from the expertise of his partner in Nippon mobile Internet , Eldorado for future online services. Masayoshi Son, Softbank's CEO, welcomed the collaboration point of departure for the creation of "a gigantic social gaming in Japan.

The announcement comes shortly after the official unveiling by the blog Techcrunch specialist, an investment of Google in the same start-up to an amount between 100 and 200 million dollars. At half-word, the Google CEO Eric Schmidt has confirmed this agreement in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. "We have not announced, but you can expect to partner with Zynga," he said.This will be crucial for launching the Google Games, a social network based online game giant online search would be developing. In addition to these equity investments, Zynga has signed agreements with editorials Facebook and Yahoo! Last May by which its games are broadcast to a wide audience.

Valued at 4.5 billion

Selling virtual goods in its games, Zynga have generated 350 million dollars since the beginning of the year, with half operating profit. In 2011, its revenues could reach one billion dollars.Another indicator of investor confidence: Zynga has surpassed the 100 million players in just two and a half years, when it took four and a half years to Facebook to pass this course.

Start-up of more than 600 employees, Zynga announced so far have raised $ 219 million in four rounds. Its first fund in February 2008, amounted to 10 million dollars. Zynga then publishes the poker game Texas Hold'em on Facebook. In July 2008, another round table that will raise 29 million dollars. Zynga is beginning to diversify its offer and in April 2009, is the leading application on Facebook with 40 million active users. Launched in June of that year becomes Farmville August 2009 the first game on Facebook to cross the milestone of 10 million players.Finally, last December, the Russian fund Digital Sky Technologies, also a shareholder of Facebook, participating in a new fundraiser, Tiger Global, Institutional Venture Partners and Andreessen Horowitz, for a total of 180 million dollars. With today an investment of over $ 520 million, valuing Zynga have reached 4.5 billion dollars.

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