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Is FarmVille maker Zynga about to become Google Games?
Word on the internet this weekend was that Google has invested a huge amount of money in Zynga, the company that makes Facebook-centered games like FarmVille, Mafia Wars and FrontierVille. Rumor has it that the $100 million-plus investment is part of a larger strategy that will end up with the launch of Google Games later this year. There's no more popular, more addictive collection of games on the Web than Zynga's, so it makes sense that Google wouldn't want to compete starting from scratch. TechCrunch speculates that Google will be able to break up Zynga's partnership with PayPal, and push all those in-game purchases through Google Checkout. Of course, this is also a major development in Google's relationship to Facebook, because Zynga has gathered a massive amount of data from Facebook users, so Google could be using that as a backdoor to buy into Facebook's network and boost its own social offerings (like Google Me, maybe) [Google Me needs games too! -Ed]. In case there was any doubt Google Games is for real, TC also posted a link to a job opening for a Google Games product lead.
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Subscribe to commentsRyan EmerleJul 12th 2010 9:22AM
I think this may be a means of bringing a better gaming experience to Android. Since Android 2.2 supports flash, Google could get a lot of mileage out of curating and cultivating a flash-based game "market". They could easily crush Apple's AppStore *number of apps* nearly overnight by bringing in this element and enabling flash game developers to make a buck or two.
I think this is a very early move before their final checkmate.