Zynga has removed its hit social game FarmVille from Microsoft’s MSN Games portal, according to a report by Inside Social Games.
The blog reported that FarmVille suggests that the game, which has more than 60 million monthly users on Facebook, either didn’t do that well or was the subject of some kind of dispute. Zynga put FarmVille on MSN in February as part of an effort to diversify away from Facebook, which accounts for most of Zynga’s 200-million-plus users.
Zynga has canceled deals before. It did so with the social network Tagged. But for the most part, Zynga has been diversifying aggressively. It has cut deals with Yahoo and Japan’s SoftBank, and is expected to launch games on Google’s upcoming social network. Zynga also set up its own FarmVille.com web site and launched FarmVille on the iPhone.
Oddly enough, Microsoft says MSN reaches more than 500 million users, which is about the same as Facebook’s reach. It would be very interesting to know why Zynga would try such an experiment and then pull out of it. Zynga hasn’t yet offered a comment.