Many already know about Zynga’s large slate of social games, but the company hopes to diversify portfolio by expanding its status as a third-party publisher.
Six months ago, the social-gaming giant announced the creation of the Zynga Platform, an effort to publish third-party games. Since then, the list of partners has only been growing.
With the addition of Antic Entertainment, Big Bite Games, CrayonPixel, Eruptive Games, JamRT, The Method, Playnery, RocketPlay, and TikGames, the total number of developers under this program now stands at 24. By signing up with Zynga, developers receive exposure to the 306 million monthly active users across the Zynga network (which takes into account Facebook, Zynga.com, and mobile devices).
The first batch of third-party games — Sava Transmedia’s Rubber Tacos, RocketPlay’s Sports Casino, Majesco’s Mini Putt Park, and 50 Cubes’ Fashion Designer — are now playable at Zynga.com. Twelve more were on display during last night’s Zynga Partners event at its San Francisco headquarters.
On the benefits of working with Zynga
As a part of yesterday’s showcase, Zynga hosted a 20-minute panel with three of its third-party developers to discuss the challenges and rewards of working with the mobile gaming giant.
“Our hope for the Zynga Platform goes beyond exposing our partners’ games to the 306 million active monthly users we have,” said Rob Dyer, the vice president of partner publishing at Zynga, at the beginning of the panel. “We are here to build a destination site that really shows this diverse number of genres…. These aren’t Zynga games. These are things completely out of the norm that you would expect from Zynga.”
Not surprisingly, one of the mains reasons these studios partnered with Zynga was to get access to its massive user base.
“For us, it was really a no-brainer,” said Michael Movel, the creative director at the U.K.-based Fat Pebble. “We’re a really small company. We’re very new. We weren’t planning on getting a publisher; we were going to self-publish and learn from that…. For us it’s two things: The first thing, as these guys were saying, is the distribution. Zynga is at the top of the game at this thing, [and] we couldn’t hope to match that. And the second thing is advice: We’re good at making games. We’ve been making games for 15 to 20 years; we can do that. We’re not so good at marketing, at distribution, at PR, and monetization as well, which is something we could get great advice from [them].”
“For [Zynga] to be successful, they have to make us successful,” said Alain Tascan, the president and CEO of Sava Transmedia. “Yes, it’s sometimes difficult because we have timelines and we’re doing stuff that nobody did before, but I think they’re the best partner…to go into this new era of [gaming].”