FishVille Offline and Zynga Takes its Offer Providers Offline

Zynga, the largest Facebook game developer and one of the largest on MySpace, has taken offers out of all of its games — a reaction to the appearance of scammy offers within Zynga’s new game, FishVille.

This is the latest blow to offer companies in social gaming. Zynga “has not been able to control the ad content as it is managed by the offer companies that we work with,” chief executive Mark Pincus wrote on his blog today. The company has previously said it works with six offer providers, with offers making up around a third of its revenue overall.

“[We] are removing all CPA offers across Zynga games until we can control their inclusion and presentation ourselves,” he says. ” This will be effective by end of day today. This move is worth it for the long-term user experience and value to our partners like facebook and myspace.”

Zynga launched FishVille last Friday, and when we covered it we noted the presence of mobile offers. The ones we saw looked legitimate, but TechCrunch found some that weren’t. Offer provider DoubleDing said it had included these offers by mistake. But the mistake came at a terrible time, as much of the industry has been already tarnished by the presence of scammy offers in games.

The result is that Facebook has taken FishVille offline. While Zynga has been running these offers in its games for many months, it is no surprise to see the company decide to take all its offer providers offline now. More, from Pincus:

Yesterday’s mobile offer issue was particularly painful as we had helped fund DoubleDing earlier this year in the hopes of cleaning up the space and raising the bar on user experience. We intend to influence them and others to improve their ad content and be long-term focused for the success of the social gaming and social networking industries.