One of the world’s most successful proprietors of video games, Zynga, has launched its own gaming platform, aptly named Zynga.com.

Zynga has achieved massive success publishing games on social media platforms such as Facebook and iTunes. If you’re familiar with the likes of Farmville, CasteVille, or Empires & Allies then Zynga has touched your life.

Zynga.com is intended to make it easier for people to connect with friends and play online, and it offers new features such as the live Social Stream which enables players to play in real time against their friends, and find new friends.

The core gaming community may roll their collective eyes at the announcement, but the reality is that Zynga represents one of the most powerful segments of the global video games industry.

CityVille boasts around 54 million active users, making it one of the world’s most played videos games, and Zynga’s games collectively attract over 200 million active users.

“We’ve invested heavily to building a network and infrastructure tuned for delivering social gaming at scale. We’ve learned a lot about developing, launching, scaling and supporting the most socially engaging play experiences and we’re excited today to begin to apply this to a broader set of games. We’re building a dedicated environment for our players to interact with each other around our games and we’re excited to make that network available to our fellow developers so our players can enjoy their awesome games too.”

Until now Zynga has leveraged the overwhelming pervasiveness of Facebook to make its casual games successful. Whether or not it will be able to draw comparable audiences across to its own separate platform remains to be seen, but we’re definitely keeping an eye on Zynga.com.