Facebook and Zynga have announced a 5 year partnership today along with an expansion of Facebook credits in Zynga games. Sheryl Sandberg, COO at Facebook said

“We are pleased to enter into a new agreement with Zynga to enhance the experience for Facebook users who play Zynga games”

Zynga the leader in social gaming has some very prominent games on Facebook including FarmVille, Mafia Wars etc. Zynga’s growth over the past 3 years has been phenomenal. Farm Ville itself is way too huge and it reportedly more active users than Twitter. Zyanga was also PayPal’s 2nd biggest merchant last year. Mark Pincus, founder and CEO at Zynga said

“Facebook was a pioneer in opening their platform in 2007 and in just three years tens of millions of Facebook users play our games everyday, from FarmVille and Cafe World to Treasure Isle and Mafia Wars,”

This partnership has come as surprise considering the tussle going on between the two companies for past couple of months had reportedly gone so serious that Zynga was all set to move out of Facebook. Zyanga was upset over Facebook’s new and only payment platform “Facebook credits” which will take a huge 30% cut on each transaction.

The details of the partnership were not revealed but we can expect Zynga getting some concessions from Facebook. This is the best interest of both of them, more so of Zynga. Zynga has already started  building its empire outside Facebook to gain independence from a foreign platform and expect it to pursue this  as aggressively in coming years.