Zynga will relaunch its corporate website as a social gaming platform in the next few days, but has denied the initiative is an attempt to move away from Facebook.
The developer of games such as Zynga Poker and Farmville generated 93% of its revenues through the social network last year, with Zynga games accounting for 12% of Facebook’s, according to IPO filings.
However, announcing the revamp yesterday, CEO Mark Pincus made a point of emphasising that the company saw the new Zynga Platform as representing a deepening rather than a loosening of its ties with Facebook, with players required to log in through their Facebook account and Facebook still taking a 30% cut of transactions on the Zynga platform.
Pincus said yesterday: “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.”
The San-Francisco company, which has 240 million monthly players, 30 million of which are accounted for by Zynga Poker, revealed in its last quarterly earnings statement that it spent US$500m last year on expanding its IT infrastructure, dubbed the Z Cloud, as it looks to distribute its games via more channels and platforms, such as mobile, and diversify its revenue streams beyond Facebook.
Company CEO Pincus spoke Wednesday of the “mind-blowing” potential in real-money gambling and hinted Zynga may partner with a US casino group before the year is out. A standalone presence and platform outside of Facebook would presumably give Zynga more freedom to pursue these opportunities.
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