Facebook is just a client. Users, content, and data are all portable. If a user can access his or her Farmville world in 1 of 5 places, I don't think it's such a big deal that 1 of those places goes away, which itself is unlikely for now.
No they're not. If they were, Zynga would have created their own portal. They did launch farmville.com for farmville. They did not launch cityville.com for cityville. That, imho, means they concede they can't make it on their own.
Mm I think you misunderstood my comment. I said Facebook is just a client, to which you say they're not, to which you contradicted yourself by saying that they launched farmville.com for farmville. Let me clarify. By client, I mean the technical term for client, as in the Facebook canvas is just a play client for the Farmville game. They built another play client on their home portal to support Farmville. They built yet another play client app on iOS that supports Farmville. Users/content/data are all portable between each client. If Facebook is gone, Zynga has other places to go. Yes, they may lose virality, marketing, user base, and all that, but their accounts/content/data are not gone, and users have many places to still play Zynga games should Facebook go away. Your article just tells me Zynga won't leave Facebook. I know that. I'm just saying they're not necessarily dead if Facebook is dead and touching their stock isn't such a silly thing to do.
I don't think the concern is that FB will die, but that FB is in control of the platform.
Outside of any agreement Zynga and FB have, if FB takes an action that hurts Zynga (for example, hiding all Zynga games), there's little recourse for them. Technically, you can still play farmville on farmville.com, but many, many people play farmville by searching for "facebook" in their address bar.
Let me explain a bit more: no other social network has the combination of virality (some call it spam), reach and suitable audience (non-geeks, and non-teens) that facebook offers. With the current roster of games, zynga can only be successful on facebook. Sure, if facebook shuts down their channels, zynga will move to orkut, or hi5 or some chinese social network. BUT, over there zynga will make 1/10 of the revenues, basically because they are popular in non-lucrative markets. OTOH, Zynga has signed an agreement with facebook, in which, i presume facebook has agreed not to cut off the viral channels for a number of years.
The relationship benefits both parties though, if Zynga wasn't on the Facebook platform Facebook's numbers would look a lot worse. Sure Zynga relies on Facebook more than the other way around but I see it as unlikely that Facebook would ever cut them off.
