Zynga Teams Up With Tencent To Launch ‘Zynga City,’ Chinese Version Of CityVille

Zynga’s CityVille, the biggest social game on Facebook with more than 90 million monthly players, has taken Facebook by storm and is available in a number of different languages, but the popular social game has yet to hit places that don’t have access to Facebook — at least until now. Zynga has partnered up with Tencent, China’s leading Internet service company, to launch a region-specific version of the game called “Zynga City.”

Zynga City will operate on Tencent’s Open Platform and first launch in beta on Tencent’s Pengyou platform. Following the beta launch, Zynga City will launch on several of Tencent’s platforms including QZone. Recently Tencent has integrated a number of platforms into their service including Pengyou, Weibo, QQ games, QZone and Q+. Zynga is one of the first international social game developers to create a game on Tencent.
Andy Tian, General Manager of Zynga China, spoke on their partnership with Tencent:

As a social game developer, Zynga fully recognizes the value of Tencent’s Open Platform and their professional service capability. CityVille is Zynga’s largest and most popular game and Zynga is proud to partner with the leading open platform in China to bring the innovation and delight of the game to Chinese players. We are excited that a fully localized Zynga City will be introduced to the Chinese audience and look forward to enabling them to connect in a fun, harmonious way.

Zynga City is catered specifically to the Chinese audience. It will include architecture that the audience will recognize and events and competitions related to Chinese holidays and news. The game has culturally relevant features like the ability for users to send street peddlers to their friends’ cities and various quests.
Zynga isn’t completely new to China. The company opened an office in Beijing last year after acquiring the Beijing-based game startup XPD. In August, they released their first game in China called Zynga Texas Poker.
In July, Zynga filed for an IPO and hoped to raise $1 billion dollars with its sales. They’re currently working on expanding their mobile branch and have acquired the Toronto-based mobile app developers, Five Mobile.