PetVille Ends Cross-Promotion of Zynga Poker - Is Synchronous Game Play Dead?

With the release of PetVille last week, one of the more notable changes is that Zynga stopped cross-promoting Texas Hold’em Poker, signaling that Zynga is continuing to move away from the synchronous games of its early days and dedicating its resources more fully on asynchronous games.

I generally think of Zynga going through three game development stages:

Stage One – Turn-based social games

  • Key games: Scramble, PathWords, Word Twist, Sodoku, Attack!
  • These games were fairly popular in the days of Scrabulous, but head-to-head play among friends was often a waiting fiasco: Users came on at different points in the day for a asynchronous session and would have to wait for others in a game to finally log on and take their turn before game play could proceed.
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