Zynga announces HTML 5 games, will run on Facebook for iPad
Social game giant Zynga is holding a press conference in San Francisco right now, and the company has announced that it will be releasing a series of new games for Facebook, all built in HTML 5 rather than Flash. That's especially interesting for us iPad users, because it means that those games will show up, fully playable, inside the new Facebook for iPad app, released yesterday. Currently, the iPad app will link out to other games you have installed on the iPad (so if you click a link for Words with Friends or Zynga Poker, for example, the iPad will actually load up that game), but with these HTML 5 games, the games will play right inside the Facebook app itself.
That's pretty huge, especially for fans of these social games like Farmville and Empires and Allies (which are indeed extremely popular, as much as people may make fun of "cow clicking"). Zynga didn't reveal just what these HTML 5 games were yet. There is currently a version of Farmville available on the iPad, so I doubt these will be remakes. More likely, they'll be all-new games, built especially for HTML 5, that will run in both the browser and the iPad app. We'll have to see going forward how the company makes use of this new platform on the iPad app itself.
