With the release of PetVille last week, one of the more notable changes is that Zynga stopped cross-promoting Texas Hold’em Poker, signaling that Zynga is continuing to move away from the synchronous games of its early days and dedicating its resources more fully on asynchronous games.

I generally think of Zynga going through three game development stages:
Stage One – Turn-based social games
* Key games: Scramble, PathWords, Word Twist, Sodoku, Attack!
* These games were fairly popular in the days of Scrabulous, but head-to-head play among friends was often a waiting fiasco: Users came on at different points in the day for a asynchronous session and would have to wait for others in a game to finally log on and take their turn before game play could proceed.
Stage Two – Testing Three Paths: Asynchronous, Synchronous and Sim Games
* Key games: Mafia Wars, Texas Hold’em and YoVille
* Mafia Wars created the ability to leverage those short, multiple-times-a-day user sessions and provide a core asynchronous play style that was duplicated in a multitude of titles (Gang Wars, Space Wars, Dragon Wars, Street Rcing, Fashion Wars, Vampire Wars, Special Forces, Dope Wars, Pirates)
* Texas Hold’em (eventually renamed Zynga Poker) invested heavily in a robust lobby system, allowing users to join other Facebook users not in their network in synchronous play
* YoVille was also developed in this period (my understanding that this was actually developed externally and purchased by Zynga) providing a valuable learning experience about what worked in sim games.
Stage Three – The Rise of Sim [...]