One of the world’s leading social gaming players has just announced the opening of Zynga India. The gaming firm has opened its first office in Bangalore. Significantly, it is the company’s first ever official foray outside the US. 

Their nascent India operation, to begin with, will primarily focus on popular games apart from development of large-scale infrastructure to support their games avidly followed and played by millions of users every day.

Nearly Forty one percent of the active Internet users played games online in 2008 in India. According to the Internet and Mobile Association of India, this is up nearly 89 percent from the previous year. Underlining the rapidly expanding scene of online gaming in one of the world’s biggest markets, that India is,.an official press release from Zynga says: “India is slated to be the third largest online market just behind China and the US by the year 2013 thanks to the country’s 81 million Internet users.

“Zynga hopes exposure of its popular social games such as Café World, FishVille, FarmVille, and Mafia Wars, will grow fast among Indian players now with the presence of a local office.” The new office will add to their current game studios located in San Francisco, Baltimore, and Los Angeles.

Zynga India is going to recruit engineers and computer scientists proficient in the job of building scalable infrastructure. Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus elaborated, ‘Social gaming combines the best of game storytelling.with web technical talent. India currently offers among the world’s richest and most sophisticated technical talent bases. We’re thrilled to have a local presence.”

Zynga, incidentally, was named after its Mr Pincus’s 13-year old Bulldog who passed away in 2008. Zinga’s name was derived from the Swahili name for a warrior princess of Africa.