A new game site and platform for third-party developers

Mar 2, 2012 10:23 GMT  ·  By

Zynga has announced that it is ready to fly solo, albeit not too far from the nest, thanks to its brand new Zynga.com platform. Zynga.com will be home to some of the company's most popular games, which will still be available on other platforms, social networks and so on, but, crucially, it will also house third-party games.

It's a strategy that traditional game makers, like Nintendo, have been applying to great success for decades.

For Zynga, it's a big move, both technically since the platform will run mostly on its own zCloud infrastructure and platform, but also in terms of independence.

Zynga has been the poster child for the Facebook Platform. The game developer grew exponentially to become the biggest partner on the platform, at times having the top five apps on Facebook.

This huge success enabled it to get huge funding, initially, and then to go public, last fall, before Facebook. It's got solid revenue figures and, while growth may be slowing, its games are as popular as ever.

But it has one big problem, it's still highly dependent on Facebook, 90 percent of its revenue came from Facebook last year.

At the same time, 12 percent of Facebook's revenue came from Zynga, either via the 30 percent cut from Facebook Credits transactions or from ads Zynga bought on the social network.

This symbiosis, while working for the time being, puts Zynga in a precarious position, one its shareholders are not happy about. It also limits its growth, both in terms of users and in terms of revenue.

This is where Zynga.com comes in. On the one hand, if Zynga manages to attract enough people to the site, it may start to debut games there, even make them exclusive.

What's more, it would be free to use any payments system it wants with these new games, removing Facebook out of the equation.

On the other hand, third-party game developers will be able to leverage the built-in audience on Zynga.com, but, very important for small developers, the cloud infrastructure, ensuring Zynga a new revenue stream.

It's a big "if" though, even someone as big Zynga can't guarantee that it will manage to attract users to Zynga.com. The reason why games have been so successful on Facebook is that people already spend a lot of time on Facebook, more than on any other site on the planet.

It's not just the social graph and playing with friends, it's that users are already on Facebook making it easy for them to see a notification, or something from a friend and start playing themselves.

It will be much harder for Zynga to convince people to go to Zynga.com first, even if the site is still very much linked to Facebook.