Zynga Online Gaming Company Case Study Assignment

Zynga Online Gaming Company Case Study
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Introduction
Zynga Inc based in the United States; San Francisco was established in 2007 as a private held company until its 2011 IPO. It develops social games that are played on various social networks including Facebook, as well as on mobile devices, such as iphone and ipad. The company is renowned for titles, such as FarmVille, CityVille, Empire and Allies, CastleVille, and Texas HoldEm Poker (Engelson & Eisner, 2013).
Resource-based view of Zynga
According to resource-based view of the firm strategy, for a resource to provide a firm with the potential for a sustainable competitive advantage, it should possess four characteristics, which include valuable, rare, hard for competitors to imitate, and must have no strategically corresponding substitutes. The internal resources and assets of Zynga company posses the four attributes, which bestow the company with a sustainable competitive advantage. Zynga tangible resources include cash and cash equivalents, property and equipments, marketable securities, and accounts receivable. Its capacity to raise equity through public offering makes it more financially stable. Moreover, Zynga has invested extensively in developing proprietary scalable technology infrastructure and game engine technology to aid the expansion of its business. Zynga’s business is mostly based on the creation, acquisition, utilization, and protection of intellectual property. It uses a mixture of trade secret, copyright, trademark, domain name, and patents to protect the games and other intellectual property. Most of its intellectual property is in the form of software code, patented technology, and trade secrets used to develop the games and to allow them to run correctly on various platforms. Zynga being one of the leading game developers possess its own gaming rights and coding to those games. Furthermore, the company innovative production processes confer Zynga a competitive edge against its competitors. In addition, Zynga effective strategic planning processes enable it to develop newer and more popular games, such as FarmVille (Runge, 2015).
Zynga success is mostly attributed to its intangible assets, which include innovation, reputation, and human resource. The strategic decision of Zynga to establish its own private cloud infrastructure depicts the company novelty and readiness for an on-line gaming growth. The company pattern of success in related games, such as FarmVille, CityVille, and CastleVille is maintaining the essential structural procedure for new games and adjusting the components and their interactions. This can be viewed as a type of component innovation, which involves alterations to one or more elements of a product system without significantly affecting the overall design. Furthermore, Zynga has developed a network that allows third party developers to become part of the Zynga network, which have facilitated the company to tap innovation capacities (Engelson & Eisner, 2013).
The experience and capabilities of employees play a critical role in enabling the company to have a competitive advantage in the on-line gaming industry. Zynga has cultivated ...