14 DAY TRIAL // Zynga has just signed a long-term deal with Facebook ending the mounting hostilities between the two companies. The move was thought to settle things down for a while, but it looks like Zynga doesn’t intend to rest on its laurels soon. The company has just announced a new partnership with Yahoo, a major win for both companies. Yahoo, though struggling a bit in recent years, has one of the biggest audiences on the planet. Zynga is also a giant in its own right so a partnership may end up benefiting both companies greatly.
“Today, we’re announcing a partnership with Zynga the developer of hit social games such as Farmville, Mafia Wars, and Fishville. In the coming months, you’ll be able to play your favorite Zynga games in multiple places across Yahoo! like the homepage, Games, My Yahoo!, Messenger, and many others sites, using your Yahoo! ID,” Yahoo announced on its corporate blog.
Popular titles from the social game maker will be available on a number of Yahoo proprieties. With a combined audience of 600 million people, Yahoo’s online empire is one of the largest in the world and is still bigger than Facebook, which is getting close to the unofficial number of 500 million users.
At the same time, Zynga boasts over 200 million players a month, a number that is still growing at an impressive pace. It’s one of the hottest companies in Silicon Valley at the moment, but its dependence on Facebook put it in a sensitive position. It signed a deal with the social network, guaranteeing that its games will be available on the platform for the next five years, but it looks like it’s still searching for ways to expand.
It remains to be seen if Zynga can replicate its success on Facebook with Yahoo, but things look promising. Yahoo already has a solid position in casual gaming and targets the same mainstream audience Zynga does. And the partnership does seem to be more than skin deep, all the games will get the same social features people are used to on Facebook.