据福布斯报道，社交游戏开发商Zynga公司CEO马克·平卡斯（Mark Pincus）日前加入了福布斯亿万富翁的行列，身价达到10亿美元。他所创办的Zynga已向Facebook用户推出《FarmVille》、《Mafia Wars》和《CityVille》等热门游戏，其中《CityVille》目前每日用户达到了2000万左右。

Zynga Mark Pincus

Zynga游戏主要通过虚拟商品创造收益，例如向《FarmVille》用户提供花园守护神、鸡笼等物品，让希望获得更高游戏体验的用户，付费购买这些虚拟商品。

该公司在2007年才成立，在短短几年时间取得的如此成就确实令人震惊。游戏邦获悉，这家尚未上市的公司至今已通过四轮融资获得2.19亿美元支持，其主要投资者包括已成为亿万富翁的PayPal创始人、Facebook天使投资人Peter Thiel，LinkedIn公司的Reid Hoffman，以及另一名新晋亿万富翁Yuri Milner。据称Zynga目前正准备再融资5亿美元，这个消息传出后该公司的估值达到70亿至100亿美元。

游戏邦还得知，毕业于沃顿商学院的平卡斯拥有哈佛MBA学位，在创办Zynga之前曾在华尔街从事风险投资行业的工作，并创办过不少新兴科技企业，他用自己心爱的斗牛犬的名字“Zynga”为这家社交游戏公司命名。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，转载请注明来源：游戏邦）

FarmVille Creator Mark Pincus Joins Billionaires Club

It turns out there’s real money in virtual farming.

Mark Pincus, creator of the wildly popular online game FarmVille, joins the Forbes Billionaires List this year with a net worth of $1 billion. His social gaming company Zynga produces the interactive game, played via Facebook, that sees players fertilize and harvest digital crops and tend to virtual livestock.

Zynga is also behind MafiaWars — players order mob hits on their Facebook friends — and CityVille, which allows users to build and run a web-based city from the ground up. The latter attracts 20 million players a day.

The company’s revenues come from charging real-world cash to gamers wanting to spiff up their virtual worlds; FarmVille “farmers” might buy a garden gnome or an extra chicken coop.

Zynga’s success since its creation in 2007 is staggering. The private company has already raised $219 million in four rounds of funding from high-profile sources including billionaire PayPal founder and Facebook angel investor Peter Thiel, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and another newly minted Forbes billionaire, Yuri Milner. Now, Zynga is reportedly looking to raise another $500 million, which would value the company somewhere between $7 billion and $10 billion.

Before Zynga, Wharton grad Pincus did the requisite stint on Wall Street and worked in venture capital before earning an MBA from Harvard. He launched a handful of tech start-ups before Zynga, which he named after his beloved late bulldog.（source:.forbes.com）