Zynga Shares Growth Stats, Now Employing Over 1,200

Matching the audience growth of its social games, Zynga has increased its headcount to over 1,200 full time employees and is rapidly expanding its infrastructure to accommodate traffic. The FarmVille developer, which operates six of the most popular games on Facebook right now based on monthly active users, has picked up much of its new staff through acquisitions -- recent purchases of companies like XPD Media and Unoh have boosted the number of the firm's studios up to 13. Speaking at Oracle's OpenWorld conference, Zynga CTO Cadir Lee claimed over 10 percent of the world's internet population, or some 215 million monthly users, has played a Zynga title, The San Francisco-based company aims to reach more of that audience with its expansions in Asia and the recent launch of a Chinese version for Texas Holdem Poker. To accommodate its growing traffic, Zynga has been adding as much as 1,000 servers every week, according to a report from TechCrunch. The developer operates its own data centers using a hybrid private and public cloud infrastructure, which see around 1 petabyte of data activity each day from Zynga games. Along with describing the challenges his company faces with increased workload (e.g. setting up those 1,000 servers) and traffic at OpenWorld, Lee outlined three primary goals for Zynga: establishing trust with its users, providing quality experiences for its users, and making games available.