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Social-gaming site Zynga may delay its initial public offering until November as a result of the current turmoil in the stock market, according to the New York Post.

Zynga was looking to raise up to $1 billion by going public as early as September. But citing sources "with knowledge of Zynga's plans," the Post said the company has been concerned by the stock market's recent up-and-down ride, prompting it to back off on its IPO for now.

Launched in 2007, Zynga has turned into a force for online social gaming with such popular titles as FarmVille, … Read more

Zynga is ditching the usual fine print of a privacy policy for, what else, a game.

That game, called PrivacyVille, is launching today. And it's not really a game as much as a tutorial on the social gaming company's privacy policies. The reward is that players who follow along and learn about the company's practices for protecting users' personal information get redeemable points.

PrivacyVille is modeled after Zynga's most popular game, CityVille. But unlike Zynga's other games you don't have to register with Zynga or be connected with Facebook to play. But if you … Read more

After a bit of a delay, FarmVille creator Zynga has announced plans to go public.

The company filed its Form S-1 registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) today. According to the company, some of the shares will be sold by Zynga, while the remaining shares will be sold by "certain stockholders." Zynga has enlisted Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and Merrill Lynch, among other investment banks, to act as underwriters.

According to The New York Times, citing "a figure used to calculate the registration fee," Zynga is expecting to raise about $1 billion … Read more

Denis Dyack, a longtime developer and founder of game studio Silicon Knights, doesn't see a healthy future for social gaming.

"It is damaging traditional gaming for sure but...how it's going to work out is anyone's guess," Dyack said in an interview with Industry Gamers published yesterday. "The trend that I see is it's probably going to be one of the biggest bubbles and explosions that our industry's seen in a long time and I think when it crashes it's going to crash very hard."

Dyack told the gaming publication … Read more

I have friends who play FarmVille. I find them very strange. They seem to believe there is some sort of joy to be obtained in caring about animals that don't exist. A little like Bigfoot-seekers.

However, Lady Gaga appears to understand them very well.

For, according to FarmVille maker Zynga, she has decided to create her own farm, creatively named GagaVille.

You might think that her Gaganess is merely having a little fun, communing with the virtual farming community to show her green credentials.

You might think Donald Trump's hair is made of gruyere. Because Gaga is reportedly using her new online Ville to release songs that you won't be able to hear anywhere else.

… Read more

FarmVille players who reach level 20 in the social game will now be tasked with working the land in rural England, Zynga said today.

Once they have access to the English Countryside, players will head there with a duke concerned that the farms on his land "have fallen into disrepair." Players get new land in the countryside and must build up their crops from scratch.

FarmVille has been an absolute success for Zynga. Currently, the title has 44 million active gamers around the world that play it each month--though that figure has been waning. Last August, Zynga noted … Read more

Angry Birds won't be making its way to Facebook anytime soon, a new report claims.

According to The Next Web, which says it spoke with Rovio's Peter Vesterbecka, the wildly popular game won't be available on Facebook until May, two months after it was expected to launch on the social network.

Last week, Rovio announced that Angry Birds would be coming to Facebook and said it would launch in March. Vesterbecka reportedly told The Next Web that he was "not sure how the March date got in there."

Rovio did not immediately respond to request … Read more

The farm just isn't exciting as the city.

CityVille, the hit social game from Zynga that allows users to build a city from the ground up, now has over 100 million monthly active users on Facebook. That user base is all the more impressive when one considers that the game hit that mark a little over one month since its release.

CityVille's meteoric rise has made FarmVille, another wildly popular title on Facebook, look, well, desolate. That game has over 57 million active users, according to its Facebook page.

Zynga's CityVille success has helped the company maintain … Read more

FarmVille creator and upstart Zynga could be worth more than the more established Electronic Arts.

According to a valuation on SharesPost, which analyzes the value of private companies, Zynga is currently worth about $5.51 billion. As of this writing, EA's market capitalization stands at $5.2 billion.

Admittedly, valuations on SharesPost are not an exact science. The firm says that it calculates a company's value based on "recent transaction prices, current posts, research estimates, and recent last round venture financial valuations." But considering that the companies it analyzes are private, there is no way to … Read more