Farmville creator Zynga has filed to raise $1 billion in an initial public offering.
The IPO will be managed by Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs Group, Bank of America, Barclays, JPMorgan Chase and Allen & Co.
Additional details are scarce, as the San Francisco-based company is choosing to remain tight-lipped about the number of shares for sale and their corresponding price.
Kathleen Smith, a principal analyst at Renaissance Capital, explained that Zynga is joining the biggest wave of Internet IPOs – including those filed by LinkedIn, Pandora and Yandex – since the dot-com glory days.
“Investors are [certainly] going to be very interested in it,” Smith told Bloomberg. “People look at it as a proxy for Facebook.”
To be sure, “substantially all” of Zynga’s revenue are generated by games on Facebook – where the popular social networking site takes 30% of sales from virtual goods.
“Any deterioration in our relationship with Facebook would harm our business,” the company confirmed in its filing.
Meanwhile, Wedbush Securities analyst Lou Kerner said the lucrative IPO marked the “very beginning stages” of the social gaming revolution – which Zynga is currently leading.
