In an attempt to break away from its Facebook-centric model, social games service Zynga has announced the beta release of its own independent gaming platform, Zynga.com.
The new site will allow users to play popular Zynga titles, while also featuring social games from third-party developers.
“We built Zynga.com to give our players more ways to connect with each other and play great social games, whether built by Zynga or other talented developers,” says Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus. “Together with our platform partners, we look forward to bringing more play to the world on our platform.”
According to Zynga, the new platform will create a larger social gaming community online. Zynga's collaboration with Facebook has seen the social gaming company generating 12% of Facebook's revenue. On the other hand, Facebook accounts for a reported 93% of Zynga's revenues.
It is, therefore, no surprise that Zynga has emphasised it is not breaking away from the world's largest social network. In fact, the new platform will offer deep Facebook integration, and will allow users to log in with their Facebook IDs. Apart from just connecting with Facebook friends though, users will now be able to connect with any other social gamers on the site.
Facebook friends
Pincus says: “In 2007, Facebook changed the game with their courageous move to open their platform to us all. We're proud to be a part of Facebook's ecosystem and we built Zynga.com to complement their pervasive social graph. Zynga.com will be one of the first sites completely integrated with Facebook which has become the world's social dial-tone.”
Zynga reportedly has 240 million monthly active users, and the company says it will let third-party developers tap into its channels and features to increase engagement and provide analytics as well as backend technology.
“Making great social games is challenging and it's even more difficult to build for scale so millions of people worldwide can play simultaneously and have a great experience,” say Zynga CTO Cadir Lee. “Our goal for the Zynga Platform is to make it easier for game developers to build the best social games without having to deal with technology challenges.”
Initial partners for the new platform are MobScience, Row Sham Bow and Sava. Zynga says it plans to open up the platform to all developers through an API later this year.
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