Zynga, Social Gaming | featured news

Zynga said Chief Creative Officer Mike Verdu has decided to leave the social gaming firm, one of several recent departures at the company as it has faced an erosion of investor confidence.

Social games maker Zynga is preparing to set a final initial public offering price on Thursday, a day before it begins trading on the stock market, in what is shaping up to be the biggest U.S. Internet IPO since Google.

Zynga is expected to price its shares on December 15 in one of the most highly anticipated IPOs of the year. The IPO is expected to value the fast growing social gaming company at around $10bn, below some earlier estimates of as much as $20bn.

Here, direct from the S-1, is the figure that matters more. Operating income in the most recent quarter declined year over year from $13.4 million to $13 million – not the big 95% drop reported in the news.

On Tuesday, PopCap games announced it was being acquired by Electronic Arts, confirming speculation that circled late last month. The deal is valued as high as $1.3 billion in cash and stocks. But the company reportedly also fielded a huge offer from social gaming giant Zynga.

MySpace has launched a new initiative to invite social game developers like Playdom, Zynga

Ready your virtual cattle and the Microsoft branding iron. Zynga announced today that its hit social game FarmVille on Facebook has now launched on Microsoft's MSN Games portal.

Social gaming startup Zynga is seeing some impressive traction. It now boats 129 million monthly active users across its portfolio of more than 30 games, according to both Inside Facebook's AppData(see chart) and Developer Analytics.