Share This
On March 1st, 2012 - Zynga, aslo known as ZNGA on the NASDAQ market, has announced the upcoming arrival of a new platform, called the Zynga Platform. As they reported on the site, this is going to be a “new platform designed to bring players what they have asked for: new ways to play and more people to play with”.
At the beginning the platform will debut with just Words with Friends, CastleVille, Zynga Poker, Hidden Chronicles and CityVille. Then it will open the site to new developers and partners that will be able to develop their own games.
The initial release will have the following features:
- zFriends – Connect and play with more people, beyond your Facebook friends, who love to play as much as you do.
- More Games – Five of Zynga’s top games – CastleVille, Words With Friends, CityVille, Hidden Chronicles and Zynga Poker – will be accessible on the site at launch, but soon you will be able to discover and play more social games by Zynga and third party game developers.
- Social Stream
- Player Profile
Personally I think that the news is one of the strangest thing I have read in the past weeks. Zynga, after a strong collaboration with Facebook, has decided to move to its own platform. It won’t leave Facebook, but it will build another social site for gamers, but the question here is why?. There is no reason to gather all the Zynga’s games on a single site.
Further on the internet there are thousands of sites like this one. The only thing that Zynga will have is 240 million users, which , for sure, will join the platform as soon as possible, making Zynga.com one of the best place for online free games.
However the data here is different. Zynga makes more than 90% of its annual revenue on Facebook, which means that a company like Zynga, without Facebook doesn’t exist. At the same time Facebook makes 12% of its own revenue thanks to Zynga. From this data we can see that the two networks are strictly related.
Why should Zynga enlarge its roots?
It is also true to say that social web gaming are going down. The user growth isn’t going up as it did in the past three years. This could probably be a reason for leaving Facebook, but without the social integration will Zynga survive?
On the other hand and from my personal point of view I believe that there is something on under Facebook as I wrote on my firstfirst blog post. At this point no one would predict the decay of Facebook that has recently filed for a 5 Billion dollars IPO. Likewise with the introduction of timeline for brands and new apps for the open graph it seems that everything is great for Facebook.
With this idea in mind we should just say that Zynga’s choice doesn’t make any sense, but if we analyze the social networking world, we will able to see a completely open war. Pinterest is going up very quickly, Twitter with the NewNew Twitter has established its strong foundation, Google plus isn’t winning yet, but at the end thanks to google.com could have its own part in this story. At the same time social apps are spreading around the world fastly, it seems to be easier and friendly to share things by mobile devices and with the huge presence of Tumblr, which has introduced what I call “MacroBlogging”, the ways to success seem to be very small.
If we see the problem from this point of view, we will probably say that Pincus, the CEO of Zynga, did the right thing, because every empire has to end and a single company, which is on the public market, can not afford to belong to another company.
