The long awaited IPO launch of Zynga finally has a firm and official date. Venture Beat reports that the Facebook-based developer and publisher of games like Cityville, Farmville and other games will begin trading on December 16. Zynga expects that the stock value for the company will be between $8.50 to $10 a share. That means that Zynga has a total value, at least on paper, of about $10 billion.
Zynga first filed for its public stock offering on July 1 with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The company is looking to raise about $1 billion by offering 100 million shares of its stock to the public. It will trade on the Nasdaq stock market under the symbol ZNGA.
Zynga is still the leading game publisher on Facebook with the company claiming it currently has 227 million monthly active users. It also claims that every day about 54 million people play its games. That includes CityVille which is the number one game on Facebook with over 49 million players, according to AppData"s statistics. Farmville, an older Zynga game, is still the number two most popular game on Facebook with close to 31 million users.
Zynga recently launched CastleVille, which has already generated about 22 million users after just 17 days of going online. However, the earlier launch of its first sequel game, Mafia Wars 2, hasn"t been as successful. AppData shows that the game currently just has 10.9 million players since launching in mid-October and has actually lost over 3 million players in just the last week.