According to reports from CNBC this morning, prominent social gaming leader Zynga is looking to raise upwards of $2 billion as the company ventures into the alluring waters of Wall Street with an initial public offering of its own.
Zynga, which is headquartered in San Francisco, is the maker of such hit social games as FarmVille and Zynga Poker.
For now, representatives for Zynga aren’t commenting, but sources in the know report that a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is imminent.
And the new dot.com era rolls on, say some Wall Street and tech analysts, who believe companies like Zynga, LinkedIn, Pandora, and others may be rising to premature investor prominence, leading to another burst bubble in the future.
Last month the job-networking site LinkedIn launched an IPO reminiscent of the heady days of the late 1990s, complete with a triple-digit first-day price pop and voluminous share turnover.
The same thing happened to Pandora.
Just says after Pandora priced “high above” its intended initial stock price, the price briefly spiked before tumbling back down to earth and beneath that initial level in the trading days that have since followed.
CNBC noted Wednesday that the size of Zynga’s IPO “could imply a lofty valuation of $15 billion to $20 billion or more, assuming the game company follows the increasingly-popular low-float model, in which companies sell only 10 percent or so of their shares to the public—partly in hopes of driving up their valuation.”
