According to TechCrunch, social gaming jugernaut Zynga has pulled in approximately half a billion dollars in the last year, with a sizable chunk of that money coming from Google. This hints at a larger strategic partnership.

According to TechCrunch’s Arrington:

Zynga will be the cornerstone of a new Google Games to launch later this year, say multiple sources. Not only will Zynga’s games give Google Games a solid base of social games to build on, but it will also give Google the beginning of a true social graph as users log into Google to play the games.

Yikes! Just imagine what Google’s marketing geniuses could do with all the data they could harvest from Farmville, MafiaWars, Petville and other social games. There are so many ways for Google to exploit your game playing:
- Google Checkout as the means of payment
- incorporating your social graph into Google’s social graph
- incorporation into the Android OS, including real-time geo-location features (watch out FourSquare)
- full-scale game playing on the much-speculated Google tablet to compete with iPad gaming

Arrington continues:

Zynga continues to work on high level strategic business development deals. The reason these deals are so attractive to companies like Yahoo and now Google is this – Zynga allows them to rebuild the massive social graph, currently controlled by Facebook. For whatever reason people love to play these games and get passionately addicted to them, coming back day after day. That’s helped Facebook become what it is today. Google, Yahoo and others want some of that magic to rub off on them, too.

Some of the more interesting marketing opportunities for business will come when you can convert virtual purchases into real purchases. Imagine a Farmville partnership with a local farm like BeeWise in Rancho Santa Fe or grocery chain Safeway that will deliver you a box full of produce reflecting what you “grew” in Farmville. This points to what seems to be a growing trend in these games: product placement. Except this is product placement with the highest of relevance because promotions are based on a world you, the consumer, built. Get ready for partnerships with PETCO (Petville), Burpee (Farmville), Chevy (MafiaWars). It’s all going to come together in one big, neat, hyper-targeted marketing package.