Zynga Announces Project Z and A Bunch of Games

Zynga has been huge for keeping plenty of Facebook users engaged with games on Facebook, but the company seems to be making efforts to show that it is not dependent on Facebook.

About two months ago, Google launched games on Facebook rival Google+, and that includes titles from Zynga. Cityville just launched for Google+ in late September.

Now, Zynga at a special event today, announced Project Z, a way for people to play Zynga games without having to go through a social network like Facebook or Google+. Will it be successful? Who knows, but clearly the company appears to be making a statement about its independence. The company did go public this year, so that’s not a bad statement to make.

“It’s a platform for a direct relationship with consumers whether on the web, or on mobile, to give you a whole sandbox and create socialness about the games and not just within the games,” Zynga CEO Mark Pincus is quoted as saying.

Project Z is a new social games service from the company that does utilize Facebook Connect. The company says:

We’re lucky to have fantastic social platforms as partners and we continue to focus on bringing more games to mobile devices and to players all over the world. What we’ve found from talking to our players is that they want to play online with friends who love the same games, and they want to connect with others who are playing at that very moment. We call that the promise of instant social, and today we’re taking a big step towards it with the announcement of “Project Z,” a new social games service from Zynga, enabled by Facebook Connect.
 
There will be a lot more information to come as we work towards the launch of Project Z, but beginning today, players can reserve their gamer identity tags, called zTags, by visiting http://www.Zynga.com. You’ll own your zTag and it will travel with you between games on the Project Z service. Project Z is coming to a browser near you very soon. Get ready.

New games include Mafia Wars 2, Dreamzoo, Hidden Chronicles, and Zynga Bingo. More on each of these here.

Here are some tweets from the company giving a quick rundown of the event: