Social games publisher's S-1 document has information on its apps strategy
Zynga has filed for its long-awaited stock exchange flotation, with the initial public offering valuing the company at $1bn.
This story has the full details, including Zynga's $91m in profit on revenues of $600m in 2010, and its 60 million daily active users. But there is some interesting detail in the company's Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Zynga's mobile strategy.
That detail does not include any data on mobile revenues, or even downloads, however. The only mobile statistic is the claim that "Our DAUs [daily active users] on mobile platforms grew more than ten-fold from November 2010 to June 2011."
There is no doubting the increasing importance of mobile to Zynga though. The filing reveals that its November 2010 acquisition of mobile developer Newtoy - the creator of popular mobile game Words With Friends - was worth $53.3 million, with $44.3 million of that in cash, and the rest in shares.
On 15 June, Zynga had 11 games available on mobile devices, although that will presumably now be 12 thanks to the launch of CityVille Hometown a couple of weeks later. A further snippet reveals that Amazon, eBay and HBO have all advertised within Zynga's mobile games.
The filing makes it clear that mobile growth is one of Zynga's priorities going forward. "We believe there is a large opportunity to extend our brand and games to mobile platforms such as Apple iOS and Google Android," it explains.
"We will continue to make our games accessible on a large number of mobile and other Internet-connected devices and invest in developing and acquiring mobile development talent, technologies and content."
Mobile also looms large in the business risks section of the S-1 filing, with Zynga warning that "our growth prospects will suffer if we are unable to develop successful games for mobile platforms", and also that "we expect to devote substantial resources to the development of our mobile games, and our limited experience makes it difficult to know whether we will succeed in developing such games that appeal to paying players or advertisers"
That includes the admission that mobile poses a challenge for Zynga because "we will need to move beyond payment methods provided by social networks and successfully allow for a variety of payment methods and systems based on the mobile platform, geographies and other factors"
The filing cites these companies as key competitors in mobile: Electronic Arts, DeNA, Gameloft, Glu Mobile and Rovio Mobile, and says more companies are expected to enter the market too.
Here's an interesting point though: mobile may be bumping up some of Zynga's key metrics.
In the filing, the company says that at the end of March 2011, it had 62 million daily active users (DAUs), 236 million monthly average users (MAUs) and 146 million monthly unique users (MUUs) - the difference between the last two is due to individuals playing more than one Zynga game.
Here's the thing: later on in the S-1 filing, Zynga explains that "an individual who plays the same game on two different platforms (e.g., web and mobile) or on two different social networks on the same day would be counted as two DAUs".
The same is true for monthly active users: "An individual who plays the same game on two different platforms (e.g., web and mobile) or on two different social networks in a 30-day period would be counted as two MAUs".
But crucially, people playing Zynga's games across web and mobile - which will surely be an increasing body of gamers over the coming months - will also count twice. Or as Zynga puts it:
"Because we cannot distinguish unique individuals playing across multiple platforms, an individual who plays any of our games on two different platforms (e.g., web and mobile) in a given 30-day period would be counted as two MUUs."
There is nothing underhand going on here: the information is in Zynga's IPO filing after all. But if the company is planning to use MUUs as a key metric, it's interesting that people playing on their phone as well as their computer may count twice.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/appsblog/2011/jul/01/zynga-ipo-cityville-mobile
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