Zynga Moving Beyond Facebook

Extracted 01MAR2012 fromhttp://venturebeat.com/2012/03/01/zyngas-john-schappert-explains-strategy-behind-the-move-beyond-facebook-interview/

John Schappert is the chief operating officer at Zynga. Today, the company is releasing one of his team’s big projects, formerly code-named Project Z, also known as Zynga.com for consumers and Zynga Platform for third parties. The announcement move Zynga’s games beyond Facebook in a big way and they welcome third-party game publishers and developers to publish their games using Zynga’s technology and infrastructure.

These moves could help Zynga become financially more independent from Facebook, which generates 90 percent or more Zynga’s revenues, and they could help it expand. Schappert, however, says the move is aimed at enabling more gamers to quickly and easily access Zynga’s games...

We’ve listened to our players, to what they want from social gaming. They want a place where they can play together, they want a place that curates and delivers the best new social games for them, where they’ll always have a friend to play with.

And we’ve listened to our developers and partners out there. They’ve been clamoring for ways to get their games into the hands of players, and for technology to overrule the scale, to deliver better data analytics, and frankly all the stuff that we’ve been investing in for years...

the interesting thing on the partnering, the Zynga Platform Partners program, it’s got a bunch of different options for developers and frankly publishers to work with us. We can work with existing games that are already on Facebook right now, and work with those companies to bring them to Zynga.com, which we are doing. We can also work with new games that have not yet launched, and bring them across the entire Zynga network. Both Facebook and Zynga.com...

I think it’s quite analogous to [a third party organization and console maker has]. That’s why we hired Rob Dyer, he certainly headed that up for Sony and did a great job there. He’s great at cultivating relationships, spotting great talent, working with teams, providing them with the support they need to make their games as good as possible, capitalizing on the resources that the platform holder has.