Zynga's FrontierVille Hits 5 Million Daily Users

Zynga said Tuesday that FrontierVille, its latest social network game, hit 5 million daily active users late Monday following its introduction on Facebook on June 9. The Western-themed FrontierVille is the first game from Baltimore, Maryland-based Zynga East, led by Zynga chief designer Bryan Reynolds, whose past design efforts include Civilization II and Rise of Nations. By comparison, Zynga's largest current game franchise, FarmVille, released in June 2009, has over 80 million monthly active users on Facebook. Privately-held Zynga has raised hundreds of millions of dollars in funding. Most recently, the company raised a ¥13.5 billion ($147 million) investment from Japanese telecommunications and media corporation Softbank. Zynga is taking its properties beyond Facebook and the PC. The company is expanding its business to other platforms, as the developer announced this month that FarmVille is headed to iPhone, and domain names indicate that it is also headed to iPad and Android.