Zynga said that they are putting money into making new games which are based on Game of Thrones and Harry Potter licenses.
According to what Zynga CEO Frank Gibeau said in an interview with GamesBeat, the company has a plan to release a new game in the last six months of 2019 under the license dealt with Warner Bros . This game will be a match-3 game which sticks to the Harry Potter franchise.
Moreover, Gibeau also confirmed that they made a deal with HBO about Game of Thrones license and they are going to make two games about this series. The first one will be a casino slots game. Zynga will take the advantages of the storyline of Game of Thrones, which includes a huge number of characters and regions. In addition, they will focus on the graphic to make the game cooler.
Formerly an Electronic Arts executive, Gibeau has a lot of quality relationships with intellectual property holders to help Zynga become stronger. This August, Zynga revealed that a new mid-core Star Wars game will be developed by their studio NaturalMotion in England in association with Disney.
Gibeau said: “This starts to fill out our product lineup from big licenses that we wanted to go after”
He also indicated that building a mobile game fanbase is tough but the licenses are pushing them to work. Gibeau had a lot of experience of working with more than 60% of new license holders in the past.
At present, Gram Games, which was bought by Zynga in May, is developing several games and have plans for an expansion for Merged! – a puzzle game. The games are currently in soft-launch and will officially come out in 2019. Besides, the game Merge! Dragons is going to scale up, too.
Not going to stop, Zynga’s Invest and Express group is going to bring CityVille and FarmVille to mobile. The CityVille game for mobile will be introduced in 2019.
In summary, a new match-3 Harry Potter game, CityVille, two games of Game of Thrones will be created by the US team. Meanwhile, FarmVille will be made by a studio in Helsinki. Zynga’s employment has hit the peak at the moment with 1,730 people. This is very necessary for the company’s upcoming innovation.
Gibeau said that “If 2018 was the year of live operations, 2019 will be the year of new games”. He believes that these new games will take them to 2020 and beyond.