"We are hiring aggressively for our Bangalore office," Cadir Lee, CTO of social gaming company Zynga told The Economic Times shortly after the Zynga Unleashed event on Wednesday, where it unveiled many new products, including its first game, Mafia Wars 2 - on Google+ social network.
"There are certain pockets in the world where you get people that build world-class companies. Those people bring in diversity of experience, which is why we chose Bangalore. It is one of the world's top talent markets and we want to leverage that," Lee told ET.
Zynga is the maker of several social games, the most popular being its Facebook games FarmVille and CityVille. It has approximately over 60 million daily active users who interact and play with each other about 416 million times a day. Having filed with theUS Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to raise $1 billion in an initial public offering (IPO) in July this year, Zynga is currently in its "quiet period".
So, though it didn't share specific numbers, Lee said that Zynga is heavily recruiting engineers to work on distributed systems and real-time social, senior staff and creative people who can design gaming features.
"While we are looking at all sorts of emerging markets, India is a strategic R&D centre for us."
"We had earlier moved some of our game maintenance and underlying system architecture work to India. There are plans to start game development there as well," a Zynga employee confirmed. "Though an emerging gaming market, India right now is relatively more strategic as an R&D centre," said Michael Inouye, senior analyst with technology-focused market research firm ABI Research. "India offices are also key entry points for Western players into the local region."
Experts feel emerging Asian markets pose their own adaptation challenges including stricter regulations, a preference for homegrown games, playing in Internet cafes, language and local differences.
Compared to Korea or even Japan - where XBox once had a tough time competing with local players - India is relatively easier. A majority of Indian gamers tend to belong to the privileged SEC A class; they prefer English and tend to welcome US players. They are also increasingly gaming more from home, like in the West, than from cybercafes. In 2010, the percentage of gamers gaming from cyber cafes plummeted from a high of 53% to below 35%.
"The Indian market is huge for us and for social gaming in general. Whenever we release a new game or new content, India lights up on our graphs. It has always been among the first countries to adapt games quickly," said the Zynga employee.
But limited Internet connectivity continues to be an issue. "India is going to be much more of a mobile gaming place. Rather than catch up on regular gaming, it will leapfrog ahead (of the West) into mobile gaming as more smartphones and cheap tablets become more prevalant there," said Lee.
But analysts like Shalini Verma of Gartner say localization is important: "TV games on DTH platforms have seen some traction for local providers. This shows that there is a demand for games in India, but at the right price. While game developers and publishers don't need to customize their games for India from a language standpoint, they do need to still localize their business model for India."
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