Report: FarmVille fights Facebook with Zynga Live
Breaking is up is hard to do, and no one knows that more than Zynga and Facebook, whose relationship has been contentious of late. According to a report on TechCrunch.com, Zynga is preparing a backup plan in the form of Zynga Live, the company's own branded social networking site.
That would make sense, especially as Zynga's been pulling out all of the stop to capture user data, requiring players to hand over emails in order to continue playing their games and asking players to sign up for separate Zynga accounts. And now, according to an anonymous source, the FarmVille creator will be trying to get players to move away from Facebook completely, and playing FarmVille and a slew of other games on Zynga Live instead. From the initial report on TechCrunch:
On Thursday evening at 5 pm, we've confirmed, Zynga CEO Mark Pincus held an all hands meeting to tell employees that they may need to prepare for a break with Facebook. We received this email from one anonymous source, and we've confirmed it is largely accurate:
Pincus announced at a 5pm meeting yesterday at Zynga that Zynga was going to launch a social game network called Zynga Live. The Zynga Live initiative was a social gaming network. Facebook and Zynga has been negotiating on Facebook Credits and the talks turned for the worst. In the negotiation process, Facebook shut off Zynga's feeds and threatened to shut down games. Zynga in the process threatened to completely leave Facebook and prepared to do so in the previous upcoming weeks.
When will this break happen? Anytime from now to the next six months, according to the article. The big question, however, is how will FarmVille and the other Zynga game fare without the power of Facebook behind them? Would you be willing to go outside of Facebook to continue playing these games? We say 'probably,' but we'll see what happens once the Zynga revolution begins.
