When mobile gaming really came to the forefront, and a number of social games companies had successfully implemented mobile versions of it’s games, there was one glaring hole in the bunch: Zynga. The social gaming giant which has garnered most of it’s profits from players on Facebook was a bit late to the mobile party, and up until a few months ago featured only a handful of titles available for mobile. Granted, they’ve been making moves to catch up, most notably with their iDevice version of their smash hit FarmVille. Note: iDevice. Zynga’s not said a word about Android, and it’s growing market share. Until now.
Announced at Facebook’s mobile event , Zynga’s first Android device title will be … Farm Poker. An odd choice you say? Perhaps not. Zynga’s second most popular title garners around 36 million monthly and 6 million daily active users on Facebook. Not too shabby. Toss a little bit of cross promotion of your other titles in there via Facebook’s single sign on, and it looks like a recipe for ultimate success.
According to Chris Morrison at insidesocialgames.com, Zynga is also angling to make Zynga Poker the worldwide standard in Hold’em, adding Chinese language support to the game back in August.
But why Poker? Why not take your number 1 hit, and continue that train a-rollin’? There are a number of factors involved, least of which is FarmVille’s growing age and shrinking user base. The addition of FrontierVille has helped Zynga keep, if not boost, userbase numbers, but there’s certainly a bit of cannibalization from one title to the other.
The other factor to consider in Zynga’s decision to push Poker is it’s independence. Remember, Zynga Poker is akin to “The Cheese Stands Alone.” Poker is the only Zynga title that was specifically left out of the exclusive Facebook Credits deal that went down early in September. Over the past year Zynga has made significant moves to liberate themselves from Facebook dependency, with varying success. Poker games certainly attract a unique segment of gamers – one that Zynga could be trying to repeat their gathering and nurturing, turned bluff and raise strategy on.
One more factor to keep in mind with Zynga Poker is Zynga’s application to patent “Virtual Playing Chips in a Mulitiuser Online Game Network.” Note that the patent does not file for coins, credits, vcash, etc., but rather, refers directly to Chips. As far as I’m concerned, nothing says poker louder that the term “Chips”. If in fact Zynga is trying to corner and establish the global Hold’em standard, patenting the monetary mechanism involved would certainly be a good way to do it.
Combined with Poker’s relative freedom from the rest of the Zynga stables, their possible bid at cornering the global Hold’em market, a Chinese localization, and the seemingly unstoppable spread of Android, Zynga Poker may very well mark the beginning of a significant shift in strategy at Zynga.
