Yup anoher step in World Domination

Google Secretly Invested $100+ Million In Zynga, Preparing To Launch Google Games

Google has quietly (secretly, one might say) invested somewhere between $100 million and $200 million in social gaming behemoth Zynga, we’ve confirmed from multiple sources. The company has raised somewhere around half a billion dollars in venture capital in the last year alone, including $150 million from Softbank Capital last month and $180 million late last year from Digital Sky Technologies, Tiger Global, Institutional Venture Partners and Andreessen Horowitz. The Softbank announcement was never officially confirmed by the company, however.

The investment was made by Google itself, not Google Ventures, say our sources, and it’s a highly strategic deal. Zynga will be the cornerstone of a new Google Games to launch later this year, say multiple sources. Not only will Zynga’s games give Google Games a solid base of social games to build on, but it will also give Google the beginning of a true social graph as users log into Google to play the games. And I wouldn’t be surprised to see PayPal being replaced with Google Checkout as the primary payment option. Zynga is supposedly PayPal’s biggest single customer, and Google is always looking for ways to make Google Checkout relevant.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/10/google-secretly-invested-100-million-in-zynga-preparing-to-launch-google-games/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+Techcrunch+(TechCrunch)&utm_content=Google+Reader

Farmville eats my shorts

How is Zynga Paypals biggest customer? Ebay owns it and draws tons of transactions through it.

OT, sounds perfect. I love Google and my next phone will be the Droid X real soon.

Google is getting to be stupid big...

...I smell trouble on the air.

Well, maybe not trouble. Hard to say how this will affect the console space.

But Google may make themselves very big players very soon.

Between Zynga for social and games plus Sony integrating Playstation into Google Tv for it's core software they may be taking over the gaming industry as we now know it.  I mean even Nintendo doesn't have 80 million people playing it's games. Consumers will be hard pressed to purchase a game console when they can get such a breadth of software from Google's mobile devices and computers with chrome and or Chromium, which are actually viewed more as necessary devices.  Needless to say i'm very interested considering this gen is soon over as almost all of the consoles are on the way out or in decline.

I wonder if Google's attempt to buy its way into gaming is going to be as much of an uphill battle as Microsoft's. Seems that they're getting other people to do the hardware heavy lifting, so that mitigates a lot of risk right there.

This deal doesn't mention anything about exclusivity, so I expect that this deal is about assuring Zynga games on Android and Chrome platforms, and they'll continue to be available on Flash and iOS.

Zynga pulled in an estimated $270 million last year, and its raised around $500 million is capital this year? That strikes me as very dot.com era. What is Zynga supposed to do with all this money?