Mark Skaggs is a seasoned game designer whose hits such as FarmVille and Empires & Allies reached more than 365 million people. But after seven years at social mobile game giant Zynga, he resigned last fall to his next big thing. And today, he’s revealing that his future lies in making mobile games with an Indian game studio.
Mark Skaggs, senior vice president at Zynga.
In an exclusive interview with GamesBeat, Skaggs said he is joining Moonfrog Labs in Bangalore, India, as a game designer and board member. The move says a lot about how India has a chance to be the next big thing in the $30 billion mobile games market. Its market is relatively small, with revenues last year of about $200 million, but the region is adding more than 100 million smartphone users a year, and they’re starting to play a lot of games. By 2019, it could hit $3 billion, according to former game analyst Atul Bagga.
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Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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