Frank Gibeau is the new CEO of Zynga.
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Mark Pincus and Frank Gibeau talk about the future of Zynga and social mobile gaming

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 7 min

Zynga and Electronic Arts have exchanged hostages yet again. Zynga, the San Francisco social mobile game company announced yesterday that it had named former EA executive Frank Gibeau as its new chief executive. After Zynga made the announcement, Zynga’s stock price got a rare 7 percent upward bump in after-hours trading.

That speaks to investor confidence in Gibeau, who has already served for seven months on Zynga’s board of directors. Mark Pincus, the founder and prior CEO, has become the executive chairman and is staying at the company to work closely with Gibeau. We talked to both of them in an interview yesterday to find out what this means for the mobile gaming industry, which has become a $34.8 billion industry (according to research firm Newzoo).

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

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.