After months of speculation, the popular Facebook game publisher Zynga has finally and officially filed for its public stock offering. AllThingsDigital reports that the company, in its filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, is looking to raise $1 billion when it launches its IPO. Its filing also reveals much about the financial details of Zynga itself.
The SEC filing reveals that Zynga is doing pretty well even without going public. In 2010, it had $597 million in revenues from its many games including Farmville, Frontierville and others. It also generated a tidy profit of $90.6 million. In the first quarter of 2011 Zynga has already brought in $235.4 million in revenue with a profit of $11.8 million. Those numbers don"t count what Zynga has generated from its latest game, the strategy combat title Empires and Allies. Launched only a month ago, it already has surpassed Farmville in registered players with over 39 million players.
Overall, Zynga says that its games have a total of 60 million players worldwide and that gamers spend a total of 2 billion minutes a day playing Zynga"s games, mostly via Facebook. While the games themselves are free to play, Zynga gets most of its revenue by players purchasing in-game virtual items. The SEC filing also states that 38,000 virtual items are created every second.
While Zynga has officially said it wants to raise $1 billion, Reuters says via unnamed sources that the final price could be between $1.5 billion and $2 billion. That would put the company"s total value at between $15 billion and $20 billion.