Tencent gamers have news to be happy about today — Zynga’s CityVille is about to become available in simplified Chinese and will be hosted on Tencent’s Pengyou.com platform. The new localized initiative in China will be called Zynga City – a smart way to get Chinese gamers familiar with the Zynga brand. Other Tencent platforms like QZone will follow suit in the near future. Zynga’s full announcement is below, but here’s an excerpt of how Zynga City will attempt to localize:
Zynga city will include brand-new decorations and architecture the Chinese audience can identify and connect with, in-game events and competitions linked to Chinese holidays and news, as well as culturally relevant game mechanics including the feature for players to send street peddlers to their friend’s cities. Zynga City will also feature an innovative quest system to satisfying Chinese players’ desire for rich storytelling within the games they love to play.
Tencent Open Platforms include Pengyou, Weibo, QQ games, QZone, and Q+ – which have a total of 600 million users, a big deal for developers who wish to target the Chinese market. Zynga was wise to jump on-board. In fact, this isn’t the first time that the company has made a game in Chinese. FarmVille in Traditional Chinese was the first, but it is hosted on Facebook mainly for Taiwan and Hong Kong users.
 Zynga City Temple of Heaven |
 Zynga City Street Peddler |
Cityville in Chinese is Zynga’s first real move in China. Back in April when we attended GMIC in Beijing, people questioned Andy Tian, the general manager of Zynga China, on the company’s ambitions there. Tian didn’t really give a direct answer and only said that the gaming company was in China doing research. Well, this Chinese CityVille move seriously didn’t come as a surprise given that Zynga had done “intensive research” on the Chinese market. Something was bound to happen.
It’s certainly a fascinating period to see how different companies are trying to tap on the Chinese market. GREE also made an agreement with Tencent, helping mobile game developers extend their reach to over 800 million users. mig33 developers could also do the same as it recently unveiled its developer program in Singapore last week.
This year also saw Zynga expand into India as well, hiring more staff for its Bangalore office as we previously reported. The company did face difficulties in Japan however, as its partnership with Mixi on Farmville and Treasure Isle fell flat.
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