14 DAY TRIAL // Zynga might be currently best known for its Facebook-based social games, but the company has bigger ambitions and is planning to shape its own future in order to resemble the Xbox Live service from Microsoft.
Mark Pincus, who is the chief executive officer of Zynga, has told an audience at the AllThingsD D10 event that, “we would be more than a games distributor. We need more aggregated channels, we need more ways for people to find and discover new apps, and find their way back to the apps. We want to be a game network, a lot like Xbox Live.”
The executive then clarified his statements by saying that the company currently has no plans to make the move to home consoles and is still trying to grow its presence in the web and mobile-based gaming space.
Pincus also talked about how Zynga related to Facebook and answered a question from an audience member about how the two companies can become detached from one another.
The CEO says, “We’ve never thought in terms of attachment or detachment. We have a 90 to 10m rule, which means that if a platform can bring us 10m daily active users in 90 days then we invest at scale. Facebook met that rule and Android and iOS have the potential.”
Zynga recently launched a separate website that allows gamers to play all its titles without being bothered by any other social content and some see this as the first move in an inevitable divorce between the two companies.
The game publisher has also been affected by the IPO of the social network, which has pushed its own share value down.
Recently, Zynga has also pledged to move away from the current model of social gaming, which relies heavily on microtransactions and social pressure to generate revenue, in order to create more ambitious games based on ideas of designers like Brian Reynolds.