Leaving FB near the height of their popularity is a bold and smart move. Obviously they're going to do their own social gaming site. Why support their new competitor? A dumber company might have tried to hedge their bet which would have doomed their own project from the start. Doing it quick & painless might cost them some users but probably not enough to matter in the long run. They're a clever bunch. I bet they attribute the switch to growing Facebook privacy concerns to trash the competition on the way out.
They need iPhone/iPad versions of their main games. Only reason my parents are on FB is because of Farmville. They cannot play Farmville on iPad yet. My parents don't much care for FB as much as they care about Farmville. Once Zynga makes these games available as Apple apps, lot of people will use them on a more frequent basis. They'll probably want to share game info via FB but the game play could be on a phone or iPad.
Farmville piggybacked on FaceBook to get popular. I think such a move will hurt both, because<p>* not every Farmville on FaceBook user will follow Zynga<p>* a lot of Farmville players only visit FaceBook for the game<p>On the other hand: a commission of 30% seems pretty steep.
FarmVille would be "a just another one of the million stupid flash game nobody know about" without facebook.<p>btw, there is no market for flash-based games, but very big one of upcoming WebGL standard.