Facebook, Social Games | featured news

Facebook Inc. and Zynga Inc. are changing the rules of their relationship. In a bid to become less reliant on Facebook, Zynga disclosed in a filing on Thursday that it has amended the terms of its relationship with the world's largest social network so that it can now host its Web games outside of Facebook's platform, among other things. The new agreement also leaves the door open for Facebook to produce its own games and become a direct competitor to Zynga.

Zynga offers free games through Facebook, then studies data on how its audience plays them. It uses its findings to fiddle with the games to get people to play longer, tell more Facebook friends about them and buy more virtual goods.

Two versions of Pac-Man are now available n Facebook free of charge, compete with your friends' high scores in the Pac-Man Facebook games.

Zynga is close to raising as much as $500 million from a group of investors in a round of financing that could value the maker of CityVille, FarmVille and other popular Facebook games as high as $10 billion.

This is a historic moment for social games. “FarmVille,” the hit Facebook game among all hit Facebook games, is no longer the top app on the social network. For the first time since claiming the top spot more than a year ago in August 2009, FarmVille has fallen to second place in terms of monthly active users on Facebook, according to AppData.com. Coming in at no. 1 now is the app “Phrases.”

Japanese social games company DeNA is out to take down American rivals Facebook and Zynga.

Facebook revealed a set of changes to its social games infrastructure at an event for game developers at the company headquarters on Tuesday night. Each change to the gaming infrastructure in the past has stirred up controversy, and this time was no different. But for all the trouble associated with games, Facebook clearly needs them.