Noah Berger for The New York TimesMark Pincus, founder and chief executive of Zynga, announced new games Tuesday.
9:01 p.m. | Updated
SAN FRANCISCO — “Oh, thank you for saving me!” squeals Giselle the Lovely Maiden in CastleVille, the latest effort from the game company Zynga.
Giselle the Lovely Maiden is not the only one who needs some help getting through the Gloom. Zynga itself must keep up the momentum as it prepares for an expected $20 billion public offering in a manic market. It is the unquestioned leader in casual gaming and one of the most successful Internet start-ups of any kind, but some of its most recent player statistics look rather static.
Zynga executives put on a show for the media on Tuesday at the company’s headquarters here. They introduced several games, including CastleVille, Bingo, Hidden Objects and a sequel to its early hit, Mafia Wars, as well as new ways of playing old games.
They also talked about something that might be even more significant to the company’s future stockholders: a new playground that would leave it less captive to the whims of Facebook, its crucial partner.
The larger game that is playing out is Zynga’s effort to redefine itself. Fifty-nine million people around the world played one of its games every day during the second quarter, a wildly impressive number for a company less than five years old. But the number of players is essentially unchanged from the fourth quarter of 2009.
And most of that playing is done via Facebook, which takes 30 percent of the revenue that Zynga makes on its site and wields the power in the relationship.
In opening the festivities, Mark Pincus, Zynga’s founder and chief executive, said the company was not just trying to make the next hit game. It has much bigger designs.
What Zynga is calling Project Z will be a new platform, an environment tailored just for games. Executives described it as a Web site done in partnership with Facebook, but were murky on any financial aspects since their company was in its quiet period preceding a public offering, as mandated by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Clearly, however, Project Z shifts the balance of power back toward Zynga.
The platform might eventually do a lot more than that.
“The world belongs to platforms. Everyone wants to be a platform,” said Lou Kerner, an analyst with Wedbush Securities. “Look at Facebook: Two hundred thousand people are writing code to make it better, and none of them are on Facebook’s payroll.”
Mr. Kerner sees Zynga making that same leap. “If they can build and control a vibrant gaming ecosystem and tax it appropriately, they can create significant shareholder value,” he said.
In this outcome, Zynga would be a little like a movie studio, distributing the work of others. For the moment, however, it is living and dying by its own hits.
Cityville, its biggest game, has picked up a little steam recently with 13.5 million daily users, according to AppData. FrontierVille, however, has been sliding faster than a pioneer bitten by a varmint. Introduced in June 2010, FrontierVille peaked with nine million daily players but now has about 5 percent of that.
Meanwhile, the popularity this summer of the Sims Social, a casual game from a big rival, Electronic Arts, proved that the Zynga formula could be successfully captured by others.
Mr. Pincus stressed that Zynga was focusing on expanding the notion of play, including getting gamers to do more during brief stints on mobile devices — “a five- or 15-minute experience that feels like a meal.”
Several of the new games are variants of current games designed for mobile devices. “There are about a billion PCs out there and four billion mobile devices,” said the chief mobile officer, David Ko. “The opportunity is enormous.”
Zynga needs a wide reach because its games are free. Nearly all its revenue comes from selling virtual goods to the “whales,” the 5 percent of its players who want to get ahead quickly, say, by buying tractors or weapons. The larger the pool of casual players, the more whales.
CastleVille, which will be introduced before the end of the year, aims for mass appeal. In addition to the hapless Giselle, characters include the Sexy Pirate Sonja, George the Friendly Miner and Antonio, who in a short clip shown to the reporters dazzled a couple of medieval babes when he took off his shirt. If this is too mushy for some players, they can spend their time defending their castle from “beasties,” creatures whose bark and bite was left for the moment to the imagination.
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