It’s Complicated Between Zynga and Facebook

It seems that after months of tense negotiating and drawn ultimatums, Zynga may be removing itself from Facebook in order to run on its own service, Zynga Live.

According to Techcrunch, Zynga CEO Mark Pincus announced to employees

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.

All a part of the Great Facebook Deactivation wave of 2010?

Tensions between Zynga and Facebook began when the social networking site put restrictions on app messaging, the incessant notifications that used to come in a pop up window to let you know that your aunt has extra rutabagas or whatever; and allowed users to police their feeds, weeding out applications that they didn’t want to see messages from.

Facebook is now requiring all financial transactions on the website to use Facebook Credits, an online currency that it takes a 30% cut from.  This obviously puts a major kink in Zynga’s money grubbing micro-transaction based business model.  Hosting games on their own social networking site would allow Zynga to “remain in control of their own platform and they certainly wouldn’t be forced to pay a 30% tax to Facebook for Facebook Credits.”

Typically, Facebook’s response to questions about the break-up has bound almost fifty different words into the infernal service of saying absolutely nothing at all:

We have conversations with our large developers all the time and we don’t typically comment on specific discussions. But generally, our priority is to ensure a quality experience for Facebook users while fostering an innovative and dynamic environment that offers meaningful opportunities for all developers on Facebook Platform.

Does this mean we’ll be seeing a Facebook free of horribly manipulative pseudo-games masquerading under cute animation and happy exclamation points?  If so, “It could be tomorrow, it could be in six months.”  Zynga might still let users log in with their Facebook IDs, but would Facebook perhaps ban posts from Zynga Live?  We can only hope.

Full article at Techcrunch.

(via Techmeme.)