Zynga is now a third-party publisher

Zynga, the social gaming giant behind games like CastleVille and Hidden Chronicles, is opening its vast audience -- as well as its analytics -- to other developers. As part of a slew of announcements made Thursday, the company revealed that it will work with third-party companies to publish games -- new and old, exclusive and otherwise -- on its new Zynga.com social gaming platform. Such a publishing deal would expose a game to Zynga's existing 240 million monthly active users through cross-promotion, as well as the company's deep analytic tools. Specifically the company is touting its internal "active social network" (ASN) metric as a key to its analytics platform, which combines and analyzes a number of data points to put a number on how engaged a player is with their immediate circle of game-playing friends. Its first two partners in this new venture are San Diego's Mob Science (Coffee Bar) and Orlando's Row Sham Bow (Woodland Heroes). Zynga says it has several other developers on board as well, though it did not reveal who they were as part of today's announcements. While the company says it will debut exclusive games from third parties on Zynga.com, the company is coy when asked if it is specifically seeking exclusivity, with two separate representatives telling us simply that it is seeking "the best games," regardless of their origins. The company is preparing to launch third-party APIs for the platform later, though for now it is "spending quality time with a handful of partners," taking a curated approach to build out those APIs to properly scale for a variety of needs. As previously reported, the Zynga Platform will debut later this month on Zynga.com, bringing the company's popular social games away from Facebook (at least in part).