Farmville Creator Zynga is Planning IPO: Source

The creator of Famville and other popular Facebook games, Zynga Inc., is planning its initial public offering, according to a person familiar with the matter. Zynga has met with representatives of Morgan Stanley

and Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

and is close to choosing bankers to help it prepare regulatory filings, a person, who asked not to be identified, told Bloomberg. Zynga has capitalized on widely used Facebook applications such as FarmVille, CityVille, MafiaWars and Texas HoldEmPoker. Based in San Francisco, the company develops both stand-alone and application games for websites such as Facebook and MySpace. As of May, 2011, Zynga's games were used by nearly 250 million monthly active users on Facebook, according to AppData. According to the Bloomberg report, "Internet companies are lining up for IPOs after shares of LinkedIn Corp., the largest professional-networking site, more than doubled in their debut last week and Yandex NV, Russia's most popular Web-search provider, surged 55 percent yesterday. Pent-up demand for companies that have pioneered social media and foreign Internet markets is outweighing some investors' concern that technology shares may be overvalued." The company makes money by selling "virtual" goods, so the games are free for users to play. Research firm ThinkEquity LLC projects that the worldwide virtual-goods market will more than double to $20.3 billion in 2014, from $9.28 billion last year. The Bloomberg report notes that "Zynga is backed by venture firms Foundry Group, Union Square Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Institutional Venture Partners and Andreessen Horowitz. Russia's Digital Sky Technologies and Google Inc. are also stakeholders. In February, Zynga was in talks to raise funding at a valuation of about $10 billion from T. Rowe Price Group Inc. and Fidelity Investments, two people familiar with the matter said at the time."