This year’s World Wide Developer’s Conference, taking place right now in San Francisco, seems poised to focus on the gaming capabilities of the iPhone and iPad. One of the first speakers after Steve Jobs was Zynga founder Mark Pincus, who came on stage to talk about FarmVille for the iPhone.
FarmVille isn’t far off for Apple fans. Pincus says that it will be released by the end of the month, and he’s aiming for the one year anniversary date: June 19th. Noting the 70 million users that the game has on Facebook, Pincus says that the game will be essentially the same on the iPhone.
The difference is that FarmVille on the iPhone may be able to keep players engaged even better than the Facebook version, coming with with push notifications about crops — a new way to constantly ping users and get them re-engaged. That feature replaces some of what the game lost earlier this year, when Facebook revamped its notifications feed, although it will only affect current players.
Also worth noting is that Zynga will be paying the same 30 percent cut to Apple that Facebook plans to take with its Credits scheme.
After Pincus left the stage, Jobs had a couple stats to add: the App store has had five billion downloads, and made $1 billion so far for developers. With that kind of market, and Zynga’s involvement, we could see more Facebook developers diving into the market soon.
[Image via Gdgt, live coverage via MacRumors]