FarmVille developer Zynga will launch its first NFT game this year

Time:2022-02-15 Source: 825 views NFT Copy share

San Francisco-based game developer Zynga, best known for its FarmVille and CSR Racing series, has announced that it plans to release its first blockchain and NFT-based game this year.

Last year, the multi-billion-dollar game studio made waves in the crypto space by appointing Matt Wolf, who has 30 years of gaming industry experience, as vice president of Blockchain Gaming, leading the company into the nascent industry.

Zynga also announced plans to grow its blockchain gaming team from the current 15 employees to 100 by the end of this year. The company may also soon be acquired by video game giant Take-Two-Interactive, the publisher of "Grand Theft Auto," which has publicly announced it will buy the company for $12.7 billion, bringing the Completion of the acquisition in the first quarter of 2023.

Referring to the company's NFT game plans with Axios, Wolf said that the upcoming blockchain-based games will be entirely new, as adding NFTs directly to existing games such as FarmVille "doesn't make sense" ".

He said players can expect the new game to look like Mafia Wars, a now-defunct social game in which players take on the role of gangsters trying to build their own crime family.

Zynga has been taking a more aggressive move into the occasionally controversial blockchain-based gaming space than many traditional gaming companies. Indecision has always been a common trait among game studios, as cryptocurrency-related features tend to draw backlash from angry gamers.

Some players who have incorporated NFTs into their gaming experience believe that companies are simply looking for new ways to extract money from customers.

Wolf made it clear that the company's game developers will always have the option to opt in or out of any NFT program, which appears to be a lesson he has learned from witnessing protests against the technology within other game companies (EA and Ubisoft).

Despite the criticism, Wolf sees NFTs and blockchain technology as the clear next step for Zynga to create new, more realistic forms of value, ownership and wealth creation for players through a tokenized system.

He added: "By creating a complete experience that allows the player to become the owner during the game journey, our goal is to expand Zynga's user reach, increase user stickiness and retention."

In an interview with The New York Times, Wolf said he was well aware of the difficulties that NFT-based games would face: "It's all about the community... We think about giving players the opportunity to earn while playing."

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