One of my pet peeves about Facebook was getting all those stupid apparently profitable notices about what my friends were doing on Farmville or Mafia Wars. Thankfully someone showed me how to hide those things, but I'm guessing my lack of participation hasn't hurt the games' parent company, which according to this article may be valued at $1 billion. You read that right, billion with a "b." From the article:
That could make San Francisco-based Zynga the third-largest U.S. video-game publisher by market capitalization, bigger than Take-Two Interactive Software Inc., the maker of crime-game franchise “Grand Theft Auto.” New York-based Take-Two had 2008 sales of $1.54 billion and has a market value of $909 million.
Zynga will have revenue of $210 million this year and $355 million next year, according to Justin Smith, founder of the industry-tracking Web site Inside Social Games. The figures are based on estimates of Zynga’s revenue per player across all its games and its number of daily active users, Smith said.
H/T to Ed Cone for the link.
