Up until now, most people interacted with Zynga’s wildly popular games like Farm Ville, Words With Friends, and Mafia Wars via Facebook, and that’s just how Facebook liked it. But yesterday, the gaming company announced its launching a standalone site. A trial version of the she site will go live later this month. One of its features will be to connect players that don’t know each other. With her dictionary-like brain, Mother consistently outscores me in Words With Friends, but maybe now she can find a suitable opponent. Word to potential challengers: she insists on calling the game Words With Mother.
The other Old Gray Lady has this to say:
The move is likely to reduce Zynga’s reliance on Facebook, something analysts have said the company needs to do. Most Zynga games are played on that social network, which derives 12 percent of its revenue from Zynga. In the future, hard-core players will most likely go to Zynga’s own site, finding not only Zynga games but also offerings from independent developers.
So far Facebook is wishing Zynga well. That could be because Zynga has decided to let gamers pay for goods and log into their new accounts using Facebook credits and IDs. The site could potentially help you game quicker, and to the benefit of Zynga more often. When people play games using Facebook, it could take days between turns, but on the standalone site, players will know when opponents are on, and there won’t be distractions like status updates and friend requests to get in the way of building the world’s best farm.
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