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Zynga: 'I wish Apple embraced social gaming more'

More Facebook Connect on iPhone would be a start

Zynga: 'I wish Apple embraced social gaming more'
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Zynga CEO Mark Pincus hopes Apple will make more of an effort to stimulate social gaming on iPhone, ideally by making Facebook Connect a default option on its device.
"Apple is the world's greatest product company, but I wish it embraced social networking and social gaming more, and used it to market iPhones," he tells PocketGamer.biz. Zynga has so far released four social games for iPhone, including Live Poker and Mafia Wars.

"I think that the platform and social gaming would be further along if Apple baked FBConnect into it much more deeply. I wish when you registered your iPhone, it asked you right then if you have Facebook, and if so, do you want to turn it on?"

He also wishes there was a directory of iPhone users that games developers could get access to, to spur new social features in their games.

"Maybe you could just browse whatever apps your friends have," he says. "Or I could let you invite all your friends who have an iPhone to play a particular game. It opens up this person-to-person level of application discovery."

For more of Pincus's views on iPhone and social gaming, including his thoughts on how easy (or not) it is to make money from it, head to PocketGamer.biz.

Yes, that is his official press shot, if you're wondering.

Stuart Dredge
Stuart Dredge
Stuart is a freelance journalist and blogger who's been getting paid to write stuff since 1998. In that time, he's focused on topics ranging from Sega's Dreamcast console to robots. That's what you call versatility. (Or a short attention span.)