Zynga now valued at $5.51 billion, more than Electronic Arts

They didn't - just like most major companies today they steal ideas from others to use or improve on them and then market them as unique.

My wife is a big player of most Zynga games. With her ADHD it a perfect time eater for her.
With the increasing availability of the game cards at most gas stations now, its easy to see how zynga is bringing in the cash.

Couldn't care less about Zynga or Farmville, but this growth in casual games/"gamers" is worrying. At this rate even the bigger companies may eventually decide they're going after the casual market. This is a worst case scenario of course, but with more and more people playing those games it just may happen.

How are Zynga customers any different than XBox Live or PC Gamers? Some of you call them unintelligent yet just as many people sit on XBox live or Steam for 16 hrs a day doing the exact same thing.

How many times have you heard someone playing Farmville say "that noob didn't water my f*cking crops!!! WAAAA WAAAA" or "My landscaping totally PWNZ U B*TCH!!" Yes..you guys that whine and cry during Team Fortress are EXTREMELY intelligent. /sarcasm

This ins really impressive, 4 years on the bussines and already has a 5.16 Billions. value.

Farmville is such a boring game .. i wonder how people get addicted with it

My 5 year old nephew likes to play Farmville.

this is ridiculous. zynga worth more than popcap? absolutely wrong. some venture capitalist is going to get really poor.

Right Place right time. I doubt farmville would have been as succesful if it was boxed and sold at a brick and mortar. It was practically bundled with facebook; this era's AOL.

Now all they have to do is sit back and sell all of the demographic and behavior data that was handed to them by people who just can't find anything productive to do with their lives.

first farmville,mafia wars and now frontierville..zynga surely has proved that casual gaming is serious business but EA shouldnt be worried as long as they keep coming up with games like crysis,fifa and hot pursuit which makes the 'real' gamers real happy!!

do I really want to play a cartoony 2d game where I have to wait a few hours before I can actually continue with the complicated task of growing crops? no. Do I want to play games where everything explodes, has a great storyline and is in eye popping 3d detail? yes. I might go buy an EA game now.

I can't understand how a game like that can make you bigger than EA. And in such short amount of time too.

this is the age of a new dawn, where people prefer to play games for convenience (just like everything else in life nowadays). i bet if WoW and MW2 has built-in browsers for FB it will be probably just as successful except that they dont. my point is many people feel they can do more in a single web browser, like FB on chrome, than they can just burning hours and hours in the same game in a console. this is why companies like Zynga is so successful.

People have changed that's all I can say. Stop wasting your time in farmville!

It's like a ****ing joke eh? Games like Crysis that were built to not only push the envelope but take it and shred it into microscopic pieces get beaten down by a half assed game like farmville.

I have to say I hate farmville and the people that play it. It's..useless?

I find it kind of scary that a maker of such crappy games could be worth so much. They don't even try to make entertaining games- they just try to make them addictive.

Ok, let's hold on a minute.

Market cap is NOT a reflection of a company's value. It's a reflection of the speculated growth of the company, in this case.

EA has been putting out consistent good games for years. This won't change. So nobody expects EA"s stock price to jump because all EA does is put out solid games.

With Zynga, it's a little different, since they only have one good product and people are eagerly awaiting the next one. This doesn't mean that Zynga's a bigger company, more successful company, is worth more, or makes better games than EA.

You've got to be kidding me... Really? The whole thing is a waste of bandwidth and peoples little remaining mental capacity.

I agree it is boring. I've been playing it for a year now and the only reason I keep going is because my mom likes it. Seems to be big with the people who don't play 3d games.