14 DAY TRIAL // Zynga has announced that it's bringing its most popular game to date, CityVille, over to Google+. The game will be dubbed CityVille+ on the Google platform, but should otherwise be identical with the one currently topping usage charts on Facebook.
Google+ debuted a games section less than a couple of months ago. It launched with a solid selection of games, but a very limited one compared to Facebook and other places.
Now, Google has scored a major victory grabbing the top app from Facebook. It was unclear what Zynga games would be made available for Google+ since the company has an exclusivity agreement on some titles, including FarmVille.
"It’s no secret we’re big fans of Google+ here at Zynga. Last month we announced that we partnered with Google to bring Zynga Poker to Google+, and today we’re excited to add CityVille+ to the new game platform," Zynga announced.
"CityVille grew to become our largest game on Facebook, so naturally we wanted to 'build' a presence for it on Google+," it said.
"Ultimately, we want to make our games accessible to everyone, everywhere – no matter where they play or what platform they play on," it added.
CityVille has some 72 million monthly active users on Facebook. That's more than there are Google+ users in the world, so it's clear that Facebook will remain an important avenue for Zynga.
But there's nothing more that Zynga would like than to have Google+ compete more and more with Facebook. The social gaming powerhouse doesn't like to be so dependent on another company, like it is with Facebook.
The fact that Google is a fairly large investor in Zynga and that it takes a much smaller cut of the revenue on Google+, compared to Facebook's 30 percent, made the move a very easy decision for Zynga.