Zynga marches toward mobile domination - Know Your Cell

Zynga is probably still best known for its game on Facebook but the company showcased multiple new products at its Unleashed event this morning which show that it is taking steps to shake that notion. Along with building out Zynga.com, the social gaming company is going to be doubling down on mobile.

The company is already doing pretty well with its games for iOS, Android and, soon, Windows Phone, as Zynga said it had more than 22 million active mobile users. Zynga said when you add up all of its products, it's the largest mobile game maker in the world.

It has popular games like Words with Friends, Scramble with Friends, Dream Heights, the just acquired Draw Something and it will be augmenting that with multiple new products. It just introduced the Matching with Friends game is the latest and it can be downloaded here (iTunes link).

Zynga believes that its games become more fun and social when they're on as many platforms as possible and when users can interconnect - it shouldn't matter what you're playing the game on, you should be able to play with your friends across networks. To achieve that, it rolled out the Zynga with Friends network and this enables cross-platform gaming across multiple mobile operating systems and across the web and Facebook.

Zynga with Friends is the gaming company's attempt to create its own social-networking sphere based around gaming. When you're playing one of these games, you'll be able to maintain your profile, points, virtual goods and other game features on any device you have. This network is rolling out with a handful of games but we fully expect all of Zynga's games to eventually be compatible with this.

Zynga gave out some dazzling statistics about its users across all of its products and it also spoke about how it addresses those with its scalable infrastructure. Zynga gets more than 1 million interactions per second across all its products and it has developed a public-private cloud backend to keep up with demand.

It will be opening up some of those infrastructure assets to third-party developers and they will be able to focus on game design while Zynga takes care of the backend and social features. A Zynga Partners for Mobile program was also announced and it follows a similar approach for mobile game makers.

There is no word on what type of monetary cut Zynga will get from third parties. That could be particularly important on mobile because that cut may be in addition to what the app store maker gets, which is typically 30 percent. It's unclear if the economics will make sense for indie developers.

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