Mark Pincus, Zynga CEO, Goes On Charlie Rose

Yesterday Mark Pincus, the CEO of popular social gaming startup Zynga, went on Charlie Rose to discuss the future of the social gaming space. There’s nothing really new stated except for a brief mention of a new startup created by Mark Pincus’ wife. Over the past couple years, Zynga has surged to the top of the social gaming space, now attracting over 230 million monthly active users across all their applications. While growth has appeared to slow for the holidays, Zynga is leaps and bounds beyond any competitors at this point.
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Mark Pincus – CEO, Zynga

Earlier this week I had the opportunity to interview Mark Pincus of Zynga gaming network. Zynga is currently one of the most dominant social gaming companies on the web. Social gaming in general is a nascent industry but is gaining a lot of momentum and a lot of attention as participants are attracting millions of users to simple applications. You may have experience playing games such as Scrabulous on Facebook. That’s only one social game (not produced by Zynga).

Zynga now has the largest Texas Hold’em poker game on the web with a presence across a number of social networks including Mysapce and Facebook. Back in February we covered the launch of the Zynga gaming platform which enabled developers to leverage some of the traffic being generated by Zynga’s overall network. At the time, Social Gaming Network (a Zynga competitor), also launched their own network. Both systems ultimately provide the same thing but currently Zynga appears to have significantly more traffic.

In the podcast Mark brings up some of the statistics being generated by their network which are substantial. We also had a chance to discuss Mark’s thoughts on the future of social gaming and where this space is headed overall. There were a few points during the interview when my Skype had some hiccups but through context you can figure out what Mark was saying since it is no more then quarter-of-a-second interruptions. Hope you enjoy!

 
 Mark Pincus, CEO of Zynga [23:29m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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