Mafia Wars, Farmville, Zynga Poker and Treasure Isle are headed to a Yahoo! account near you soon. Announced last week, Yahoo!, in an effort to increase their appeal and audience (yes, Yahoo! is still around), has signed a deal with popular social games maker Zynga to bring the popular titles to the Y!’s network.
Initial details of the agreement will see Zynga games available to Yahoo! users across a number of Yahoo! properties including the homepage, Yahoo! Games, Yahoo! Mail, and Yahoo! Messenger. Players will be able to share updates across not only their Yahoo! profile, but external sites as well. In other words…all the Facebook features, just without Facebook. Furthermore, the Zynga/Yahoo! agreement will open the doors for Zynga title integration in the Yahoo! Application Platform, which contains Yahoo!’s OpenSocial third party development platform, as well as the Yahoo! Query Language and connect program. Again, Facebook, without Facebook.
“Zynga will bring top notch social game experiences to Yahoo, including through our open platforms such as Yahoo Application Platform and Yahoo Updates. Yahoo! will also continue to work with other partners, developers and publishers to bring compelling innovations and experiences from across the web to our users,” said Hilary Schneider, executive vice president, Yahoo Americas.
Obviously, a deal like this has been long in the works. However, it does cut mighty close to the bone, especially when viewed from the Facebook table. I won’t get into the (almost) shouting match that went down between Facebook and Zynga over the past month, ultimately culminating in a “strategic relationship” that should last for the next five years, but this Yahoo! deal shows that Zynga is clearly looking well beyond Facebook.
With more than 35 million users playing Zynga games every day, according to Zynga CEO Mark Pincus, they’re clearly in a solid position to carve out deals such as this one. However, what’s Yahoo! got to offer? Currently, Yahoo! reports around 600 million users globally. Not a bad start, but nowhere even close to where they once used to be, and where the “other” search engine that dethroned them is on a daily basis. However, that’s not to say that there aren’t bright things happening at Yahoo! (and I predict that 2011 will see a strong return of Yahoo!).
Perhaps as a display of feathers, perhaps not, Yahoo! has been quietly making moves since the beginning of this year, with a January 8th announcement of Yahoo!’s “first” under the distribution for production house Electus, a May 19th acquisition of Associated Content, and a May 24th deal cut with Nokia. Adding Zynga to this list, the Yahoo! portfolio is starting to look better and better, and hey…let’s face it, Hi5 had one foot in the grave, and they’re now well in the running for the “comeback of the year” award. Can Yahoo! do the same?
