Social games producer Digital Chocolate is reporting that they’ve recently closed a series D round of funding, amounting to a healthy $12 million. Round leader Intel Capital joined previous investors Sutter Hill Ventures and Bridgescale Partners.

This new round of capital arrives as Digital Chocolate closes out a successful 2010, a year that saw their rise to one of the top five global games publishers on Facebook. Not only a success on Facebook, Digital Chocolate made 2010 the year it jumped to smartphone and tablet platforms, totaling more than 100 million mobile downloads – a healthy figure by any measurement. Moving forward, Digital Chocolate executives intend on using this new investment capital to further expand the firm’s scale and cross-platform capabilities, as well as global reach.

Digital Chocolate founder and CEO Trip Hawkins comments, “The investment from Intel Capital supports our vision of publishing leading social games across different devices and platforms. The strength of our team, combined with the strategic insight and support from Intel Capital and existing investors, will help extend our leadership in the evolving social gaming market.”

It would appear that Intel Capital is equally happy with the opportunity to be involved with Digital Chocolate as well. Managing Director Mike Buckley adds, “We’ve chosen to invest in Digital Chocolate because of its success across the fastest growing digital platforms and consumer electronics device categories. As a leading social game developer, Digital Chocolate continues to drive new features and functionality across multiple computing platforms.”

You’ll remember that it was Digital Chocolate’s cross platform strategy that put them on the fast track to becoming one of the top publishers across a variety of devices. Their early integration with Open Feint most probably helped to propel this cross platform success as well. This cross platform strategy also puts Digital Chocolate in a unique position, as their success on a variety of platforms gives them a bit of latitude when it comes to title success dependent upon the platform. A prime example of this dependency would be Zynga. Although the social games giant has, and still is, trying to diversify the platforms their players play on, the main outlet still seems to be Facebook, thus running the “all the eggs in one basket” risk. So while Digital Chocolate might not quite have the number count and expansion figures that Zynga has, in the long run, they just might have the wiser strategy driving them home.