Zynga eyeing the blockchain world may transform the industry

Who doesn’t remember the days of unwelcome Farmville spam, of Mafia War notifications and just about any other kind of game that people could play on Facebook.

Behind them all was gaming company Zynga. While it may seem like almost nobody actually played any of these games, but had an aunt who spent most of her day on them, actual evidence says otherwise – even now, when the Facebook gaming craze has mostly passed, Zynga has quarterly revenues upwards of $700 million, which is up 40% from the year before. Some 183 million people play their games, a year-on-year increase of 120%.

They suffered a pretty severe setback when Apple changed their privacy policy earlier this year and their stocks were sold of en masse. However, Zynga seems to have recovered back to more normal stock prices. That change from Apple required their advertisers to use App Tracking Transparency which allows users to opt out of being tracked across apps – a huge change for mobile advertising. Targeting users became more difficult and revenue dropped hard for many advertisers – among them Zynga and other well-known company names like Peloton.

Zynga looking to crypto and the future

Problems aside, Zynga is well on its journey back to greatness – and has recently launched Farmville 3. That’s hardly the end of their ambitions, however, like many companies they would like to eventually establish the metaverse. A metaverse is an environment that seamlessly combines online with offline, VR, AR and reality all in one go. Games like Fortnite and Minecraft already offer some elements of a metaverse in that they are frameworks that host all sorts of different activities and social opportunities. Farmville has a little bit of that as well – a multiplatform game with social elements.

Of course, the same thing is true for quite a lot of games – but Zynga doesn’t plan to leave it at that. They want to expand much further… and that includes the blockchain world.

CEO of Zynga, Frank Gibeau openly said that “we believe that blockchain is going to be part of the fabric of gaming long term.”

There are concrete plans to release projects based on blockchain in the next few months. Yet, there have been no concrete details released, apparently Zynga is quite far along in their work. As for the future of these projects – well, that’s still up in the air. Just like Zynga, other companies like Facebook themselves have already attempted to go ahead and with their own coins and wallets… and it hasn’t gone so well. Facebook in particularly managed to draw a letter from American Congress asking them to can their efforts as soon as possible (not that Facebook did so).

While Zynga is a separate company from Facebook of course, their close ties don’t necessarily suggest a more successful venture. Any company that has been accused of privacy issues and violations, and especially in light of the recent conflicts with Apple’s privacy changes, is likely to draw some criticism, Zynga included. Until they unveil their actual plans, however, it’s impossible to say how things will go for them!

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