14 DAY TRIAL // Social video game developer and publisher Zynga has announced a new website for its games, called the Zynga Platform, which might be a first step towards moving away from the social network Facebook, where its games have traditionally found success.
The Zynga Platform will be officially launched later during March on the official website of the company and gamers will be able to play the well-known titles without having to worry about the distractions that Facebook includes, from friend requests to links, photos or even invites.
The new platform will also allow gamers to find new friends, separate from their Facebook ones, that will only be used for Zynga titles.
The new category will be called ZFriends and the company plans to make it easier to discover gamers who share the same interests and invite them to collaborate.
John Schappert, the chief operations officer at Zynga, has a lot of experience in the field, having worked at Electronic Arts before that. Speaking to Gamasutra, he stated, “They want a place where they can find dedicated social games, where the feed is just about gaming.”
Despite the move away from Facebook Zynga plans to keep some of the features, like the friends that were previously recruited and the Credits system, to monetize the experience.
Schappert added, “I think we're going to find that out as we launch and make progress. We're trying to make the friction as low as possible. You log in on Facebook Connect, you pay with Facebook Credits. We didn't want to break that user experience, we want to make it as seamless as possible.”
Recent financial results from Facebook have shown that as much as 12 percent of the company’s revenue is linked with the Zynga social titles, and a complete separation will likely prove to be a business disaster for both companies.