Zynga harvests Farmville app for iPhone

Coming to a small screen near you: Farmville for iPhone.(Credit: Zynga)

The most popular Facebook game in the world is now coming to iPhone. Game maker Zynga announced on Thursday the launch of Farmville for iPhone, the same day that Apple begins selling its next-generation smartphone. Players will be able to tend their farms from where ever they are and get status updates regarding their farms via push notifications. "Mobile devices are an extension of people's daily social lives everywhere in the world and the Apple iPhone is the most innovative breakthrough in this area," Mark Pincus, founder and chief executive officer of Zynga, said in a statement. "We are excited to bring Farmville to the Apple iPhone and introduce our social games to a new audience of mobile users around the world." Nearly 64 million people play Farmville each month, more than twice the number of players claimed by No. 2 game, Texas HoldEm Poker, according to a tally by AppData. As impressive as that gap is, Farmville's popularity has been waning since its peak of around 83 million players in March. Certainly, Zynga is hoping the new iPhone app will help it to reap some of that former glory. And with good reason: for a sector that hardly existed three years ago, social-gaming publishers brought in $490 million in revenue in 2009 and that number is expected to increase to $835 million in 2010, according to Inside Social Games analyst Justin Smith. Zynga may have chosen the right moment seed the iPhone market: AT&T says demand for the iPhone 4 is 10 times what it was for the iPhone 3GS, and Apple says it took 600,000 pre-orders for the new phone through its sales channels. A Nielsen report released earlier this month pegged the iPhone OS market share at 28 percent--behind only BlackBerry maker Research In Motion, which has a 35 percent share. The new app also debuts a little more than a month after Zynga and Facebook put out a press release to try to assuage rumors that the two were feuding over the social-networking site's Facebook Credits currency platform, which would have resulted in Zynga paying Facebook a 30 percent cut of its revenue. Terms of an agreement were not revealed, but Zynga had reportedly been so angry before the announcement that it was going to launch its own game network, called "Zynga Live." The free app will be available beginning Thursday at the Apple Store.
Source: CNET News (http://cnet.com/)