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The co-founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, has praised the disruptive success of Zynga at a trade event in San Francisco.
Zuckerberg, whose story of co-creating Facebook is currently being retold in cinemas with the semi-fictional movie The Social Network, spoke highly of Zynga at the Web 2.0 Summit yesterday.
He also praised Zynga’s rival firms CrowdStar, Playfish and Playdom.
“Those are four really good game companies that are built almost entirely on Facebook,” Zuckerberg said, as quoted in a Venturebeat article.
But it was the impact of Zynga that appeared to particularly impress Zuckerberg.
“Zynga’s market value is bigger than Electronic Arts,” he said, citing recent independent valuations of the firm.
Zuckerberg said Zynga has made a “structural disruption” to the game industry.
“If you look at a lot of platforms, games are usually the first big vertical market. That’s true for the iPhone. Even if you go back to the early PC, some of the first things that got people excited were games,” he said.
The social network’s relationship with games has become more fraught in recent times – with ‘virality caps’ implemented and an increasing pressure on developers to use Facebook Credits.
But Zuckerberg remains thankful to the developers that operate on his social network. He said that Facebook’s growth is indebted to games.
