Zynga creates their own social gaming platform

Zynga and Facebook have had a symbiotic relationship, so much so that Facebook even explained its relationship with Zynga in an IPO document. The document states that Zynga is responsible for 12 percent of Facebook’s revenue and has exclusivity deals with the social network. Their agreement, includes Zynga growing as a platform atop the Facebook platform. So, it comes as a little bit of a surprise when Zynga’s decided to launch its own platform for certain games. Let’s not forget that Farmville was once available through a website outside of Facebook and your farms across each platform were the same. However, now, Zynga’s announced that it’s turning its website, Zynga.com to a site where users can game, from a corporate site.

Zynga wants to make its own Facebook?

Games that will be available first on Zynga.com are Words with Friends, CastleVille, Zynga Poker, Hidden Chronicles and CityVille. The games will still retain their social element through a feature, called Social Stream, which allows you to play games with your friends as well as discover new ones on Zynga’s own site. There will also be a feature called Player Profiles, which will let you check your friends’ helpfulness score to see who’s most likely to help you back. Of course, they’ve also added a chat function, where you can chat with your friends as well as other members of the Zynga community who are interested in the same games as you. Zynga.com should be out later this month and will be available in 16 languages: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Indonesian, Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, Swedish, Traditional Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Thai.

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Through this announcement, Zynga also announced some partner developers, MobScience, Row Sham Bow and Sava, who will use Zynga’s technology to build and analyze the new social environment. Zynga says, “These developers will be able to leverage our zCloud infrastructure for scalability and availability and our analytics to measure and drive their social engagement with metrics such as ASN (Active Social Network) which measures how many friends our players interact with.” Zynga says that they will open up their API to game developers later this year, so there can be more games on their social platform.

Zynga says that this move doesn’t indicate a break away from Facebook, rather it is a move to build a platform that complements Facebook’s Open Graph. 93 percent of Zynga’s revenue comes from Facebook, so it does make more sense to not bite the hand that feeds them. The question remains, will they be able to recreate their success on Facebook through their own platform? Let us know what you think in the comments section below.