Social gaming giant Zynga has today announced changes to how it does business that could prove more detrimental than useful to bosom bud Facebook. Zynga has announced that it would be launching a number of new initiatives that would see it depend less on third-party platforms for its games, which includes Facebook.
One of the features announced is a brand new gaming subset or layer that is completely independent of Facebook. What this means is that Zynga will now be able to host its games completely independent of Facebook and have gamers never actually land on Facebook at all.
This of course looks bad from where Facebook stands because it depends on Zynga for up to 12% of its total revenues. It’s not immediately clear how Facebook will counter this announcement because it puts the social media giant in a position of less control over what happens with its partner Zynga.
The other feature announced is the launch of gaming incentives for third-party game developers to woo them to develop games for the newly launched gaming platform. This makes even worse sense for Facebook because it depends heavily on the developer community to add value to its social platform and increase user retention.
Zynga has made it clear that it sees Facebook’s other features such as news feeds and ads as a distraction for people who would otherwise be more engaged in the social games. All these changes point to a new Zynga that has come of age and is seeking more mature and business-friendly relationships with its partners.
It will be recalled that Zynga similarly severed ties with Amazon Web Services when they launched their own cloud service called Z Drive, which it hopes will attract developers who want to host their games in the cloud.
