The launch of Zynga.com is more than a bit of a reversal for the casual gaming company. After all, Zynga really only exists today because it tapped into Facebook’s app platform and rode the wave of social sharing to success. That is not necessarily a bad thing, of course. Zynga has simply been better at social than anyone else, in terms of getting users to share and convince their friends to sign up, gaining rewards all the while.

Prior to Thursday’s announcement, Zynga and Facebook had a symbiotic relationship where, like the Nile crocodile and the Egyptian plover bird, each party helped the other one out. Nearly all of Zynga’s revenues have come from Facebook, and about 12 percent of all Facebook revenues have come from Zynga.

That might have been a fine relationship to have when Zynga was a scrappy little startup, but now that it’s a publicly traded company, its reliance on Facebook is a huge risk factor for investors. So it makes sense Zynga would want to have a little more control over where and how users access its games and a little more independence from Facebook.

But I question how many casual gamers recognize that Zynga makes FarmVille, Words With Friends and Mafia Wars — and how many, knowing this, will take time out of their Facebook gaming sessions to go to some other site to play those games instead. Games will still be linked to a user’s Facebook profile, and Zynga is just giving them the option to play on Zynga.com. But it is notoriously difficult to create a platform and a destination site and to aggregate an audience, even one that is already using your product.

A lot will depend on how much actual value the Zynga.com platform will provide to consumers. Facebook works because — surprise! — people spend more time on Facebook than pretty much any other site on the Internet, as much as seven hours a week, according to a recent study.

But as time has gone on, there is evidence that it has become more and more difficult for game developers to stand out from the crowd on Facebook. Last month, IHS iSuppli reported that the percentage of all Facebook monthly active users visiting games on the site dropped from 50 percent to about 25 percent. With a growing amount of content being shared, it has become harder for gaming companies to attract new users on the social network.

Will Zynga.com help reverse the trend and get more people playing its games and others by providing an alternative place for casual gamers to congregate? Zynga is talking it up as a place where users can quickly and easily find other friends who are active on the platform. The flip side is that it might become a place where only gamers congregate, which would mean the addressable audience for new games will be much smaller than the more heavily populated platform that Facebook has.

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We’re still waiting on confirmation of the deal, but CEO and Co-Founder Chieh Huang, Co-Founder Chris Cheung and CTO William Fong have all taken titles at “Zynga NY” according to LinkedIn, with Huang listing his new title as Director, while Cheung and Fong are Director of Game Design and Director of Engineering respectively. Other Astro Ape employees have also made the jump to Zynga. Business Insider first reported the acquisition.

Astro Ape produces a handful of mobile social games, including Office Heroes, Desert Heroes, Montsterz Revenge and most recently, Vegas Strip City, the company’s first Android title, which was developed exclusively for DeNA’s Mobage social gaming platform. Japanese gaming giant DeNA is an investor in Astro Ape. Astro Ape has focused on putting together quality social games for mobile that are engaging and artistic. Astro Ape was launched in the basement of Fong’s mother’s home in New Jersey and rode its first hit Office Heroes to bigger digs in New York, where it has expanded quickly.

The move shows that Zynga is continuing its acquisition spree and is focusing its sights on mobile companies. In the company’s S-1, it said that almost all its revenue comes from Facebook right now  but the big opportunity is to diversify to mobile, which is exploding. Zynga also bought Five Mobile last month and Wonderland Software in April and has been getting good business from its pick-up of New Toy in December. It recently took out a $1 billion credit facility to fund more pick-ups. Astro Ape would be the 16th acquisition in 14 months for Zynga.

The mobile gaming landscape is also shifting as bigger gaming companies are looking to scoop up hot mobile properties. EA spent $750 million for PopCap and Digital Chocolate just bought Sandlot games. Astro Ape is a far cry from Angry Birds maker Rovio, but it shows that Zynga is very much on the hunt for mobile talent, and it’s gearing up to be a player in mobile gaming.

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Where Nintendo is right now

The past few years haven’t been overly kind to Nintendo. Even leaving aside the disastrous launch of the 3DS, which led the company to institute an emergency price cut of nearly a third in the U.S. for the handheld gaming device within six months of its introduction, Nintendo has seen its stock prices steadily decline as the early successes of the Wii and DS gradually wore off between about 2007 and 2008. Share prices are now sitting at a six-year low.

The 3DS has not succeeded in jump-starting Nintendo's flagging mobile efforts.

In its quarterly earnings report in late July, Nintendo also posted its first quarterly operating loss ever. It reported a net loss of around $328 million U.S., and an operating loss of $485 million, down from operating profit of $299 million measured year over year.

Nintendo game sales are down, but that’s just reflective of a general trend. Video game sales in general seem to be slumping lately, and fell for the second straight month in June. Nintendo still has some franchises that are doing well (the 3DS re-release Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time saw 283,000 sales in June, despite being an old game that most fans bought during its first g0-around), but milking legacy brands isn’t exactly the best way to attract new customers.

According to Wedbush Securities (via the Los Angeles Times), the DS is bleeding market share, and the 3DS isn’t picking up the slack; that’s where the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch come in.

The state of iPhone, iPad and iPod touch gaming

Claiming that smartphone gaming isn’t having an impact on Nintendo’s business, as Iwata maintains, is just plain burying your head in the sand. While traditional gaining sales see steady declines, tablet gaming is up, as is smartphone gaming, led by the iPhone. Nielsen found  that iPhone gamers spend twice as much time gaming on their devices compared to other platforms in a study last month, and app research firm Distimo found that on average, iOS users download 5.1 million games per day. While only 600,000 of those are paid, that’s still an amazing volume for a single day’s worth of business, and lots of those remaining 4.5 million are still taking in other revenues from advertising and in-app purchases.

Analysts estimate that smartphones are currently taking one out of every three dollars spent by consumers on portable gaming, and the problem for gaming-specific platforms is only expected to get worse. The iPhone and the iPad iterate much faster than do gaming consoles and handhelds, with a new model coming out approximately every year. Better hardware and software means more for developers to work with, and more potential for unique game design that catches consumer imagination, as did Angry Birds, for example.

Not uncharted territory

A screen from a recent EA iPhone release, Shift 2 Unleashed.

Nintendo wouldn’t be the first major game publisher to make the jump to iOS. It has the distinction of also being a hardware maker, but it shouldn’t let that detail become a noose around its neck. The company would do better to focus on leveraging its success on the software side in the new and thriving iOS ecosystem, the way companies like EA have managed to do.

EA Mobile’s revenue has been climbing steadily since the introduction of the iOS App Store. Revenue was up 12 percent in 2010 compared to 2009, and jumped again 10 percent during its first quarter of 2011, versus the same period a year ago. An increasing chunk of that growth can be attributed to iOS, as revenue from PSP and the DS fell by 42 percent and 27 percent respectively during the same time frame. iOS revenue for EA Mobile, by contrast, increased an impressive 100 percent during the quarter ending in May, as compared to a year ago.

The key takeaway is this: Mobile game publishers are hedging their losses with traditional handhelds and consoles by investing heavily in smartphone platforms, and iOS is delivering the highest return.

Follow the example of other gaming hardware icons

Will the 3DS or the Wii U be Nintendo's Dreamcast?

Nintendo wouldn’t be the first gaming company to stop making hardware and turn its attention entirely to software if it did change its focus to developing for Apple. Sega made the same move back in 2001, based in part on the same kind of mistake that’s causing Nintendo’s headaches today. Sega created the Dreamcast, an ambitious console that necessitated high sales targets that ended up being unreachable. The 3DS is similar to the Dreamcast in that regard, with one key difference: People loved (and still love) the Dreamcast.

Nintendo also has more reasons to embrace software development for other platforms than Sega did at the time. For one, its characters and franchises are stronger and more widely recognized, with far fewer disappointing titles to dilute the brand. And second, the question of whether or not Nintendo properties can survive and succeed on iOS isn’t really a question; it’s almost a given, considering how well even brands tangentially associated with Nintendo, like EA and Square Enix, have done on the platform.

I’ve loved Nintendo’s hardware since I got my first NES back in 1991. And I’ve owned every Nintendo console or handheld released since, with the exception of the Virtual Boy. But the only way the things I love most about Nintendo, which are its games, will survive and thrive, is by embracing the shift in gaming that the rise of mobile smart devices represents. Let’s hope Iwata, or whoever succeeds him if it comes to that, can come to grips with that.

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SGN makes games for social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, and has titles that include WarBook and Superlatives. Now that casual gaming has exploded onto the web, the business case isn’t too far-fetched. Revenue comes from ads, selling virtual goods, subscriptions or some mix of those options, with advertising being most prevalent but least effective for casual games.

Gaming has made money, but monetizing social networks is still a struggle, which makes SGN worth watching. Succeeding with advertising depends on getting large numbers of users, which Social Gaming Network — with its 1.1 million daily users — has. It’s facing a Facebook crackdown on spammy applications, which could hinder growth on that site, but is still growing on MySpace and Hi5, which have recently opened up their sites to outside apps. In order to really make money, it needs to push the sale of virtual goods. That might make it the most likely Bezos investment to succeed.

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This influx of cash comes at a moment of fierce consolidation and competition in the social gaming space, with SGN and rivals like Zynga and Rock You jostling for dominance. Last week I had a chance to chat with SGN CEO Shervin Pishevar, and got a glimpse at some of the company’s future battle plans.

While Social Gaming Network’s low-graphics games aren’t likely to be confused with a next-gen title, he told me, they’re successful enough. “Small is the new big, right?” Games like Warbook can be made with a low budget, he noted. “Even having a 100,000 daily active users is good revenue.” (At peak usage with a sponsorship deal, he said, Warbook was making $100,000 a month.) “We’re much more about engagement and retentions than virality,” Pishevar told me.

Over the next few months, Shervin Pishevar and his small team will be working on several top secret games that’ll leverage advertising and virtual item sales for revenue. While still relatively low budget, he’s working with developers to give these new titles more polish. The goal, said Pishevar, is to transform Social Gaming Network into “the Pixar of social games.” Whether that’ll enable them to dominate this space remains to be seen, but $15 million in the bank is a potent advantage.

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