We all know that social gaming giant Zynga is one of the fastest growing tech companies of all time and has turned games like FarmVille into a mainstream phenomenon. And via international expansion and deals with Facebook and Google, Zynga has continued its path to domination of the social gaming market. We have an idea of the company’s revenue and other gaming statistics, but there is some data involving the backend of the platform that has not been revealed. Today, Zynga’s CTO Cadir Lee is speaking at Oracle’s OpenWorld conference about the gaming giant’s infrastructure, business and challenges.
Lee offers the following statistics:
- 10 percent of the world’s internet population (approximately 215 million monthly users) has played a Zynga game.
- The company adds as many as 1,000 servers every week to accommodate growing traffic.
- Zynga’s properties move a whopping 1 petabyte of data daily, and the company operates its own data centers; using a hybrid private/public cloud infrastructure.
- Zynga’s technology supports 3 billion neighbor connections on games like Frontierville and Farmville.
The company itself has been steadily adding employees, through both acquisitions and new hires, and now counts more than 1,200 full time employees and includes 13 game studios.
Lee says that the three main goals of the company are to establish trust with users, make games available, and provide quality experiences for users. Challenges that the company faces, says Lee, include workload (i.e. having to add 1,000 servers in a given week). And demand is also a factor that needs to be mitigated, as game launches bring large amounts of users to the platform. Even feature launches bring massive traffic to Zynga’s servers. Lee recalls the launch of Superberries, which was planted by 10 million Zynga users. Gamers planted 700 million Superberries in the launch weekend alone.