Zynga, the world's largest social game developer, has just opened in Bangalore its largest game development studio outside the US. The company has run a small office in Bangalore for about a year with about 100 staff.

With the new Studio-I in place, the number will go up to about 200 in a year. The recruitment focus will be on game designers and artists with Bollywood experience.

It recently hired animation veteran Dhimant Vyas, best known for his claymation work for Hindi movie Taare Zameen Par. The new studio will focus on innovative game development to create new features. Additionally, it will be engaged in full life-cycle game development. Zynga is famous for popular game titles like FarmVille, CityVille and Mafia Wars, among others.

To aid this growth, Zynga India will recruit engineers, product managers, game designers, artists and senior management personnel. Visits to campuses have so far been for junior-level recruits but it wants to pro-actively look for Bollywood talent in middle and senior positions.

They will be expected to have an eye for gaming and experience in handling large volume environments, graphics, networking, cloud computing and security, among other skills.

Zynga official said India was a focus market for the company with 20.9 million Facebook users and 1.5 million players of its games.

“In only a year India has made exciting advance in technology that has truly improved efficiency for the entire company,” said Shan Kadavil, country manager of Zynga India.

“With Studio-I, we are expanding our capabilities to leverage the amount of creative talent based in India for new features within Zynga’s popular games. We are looking for more people with an entrepreneurial drive combined with engineering and artistic skills to join our exciting and growing team. Bollywood talent is an area where we have tasted success. This may be because their line of work requires a lot of creativity like developing games,” he added. According to Collen McCreary, chief people officer of Zynga Inc, the Indian hiring is not about labour cost arbitrage as the talent here is globally recognised for its prowess in animation. While in the first year Zynga India employees focused on technology aspects, the company expects the second year to be about development of and creative support to the games.

The new studio comes on the heels of the recent launch of Zynga game cards in India, which provide an easy way for players to purchase virtual goods within games.

According to recent data, Zynga has close to 270 million monthly active users, 3 to 5 per cent of whom pay money to progress in their games. The privately-held company earns close to 90 cents of each dollar in revenue from virtual currency, which helps social gamers take 'out-of-turn' moves in their games.