Facebook and Zynga have extended and renegotiated a contract that was set to expire in early 2013. The two companies were expected to part ways as recently as yesterday but that is no longer the case. The new deal ensures the social network and game developer will remain business partners through at least 2015.
Under the new agreement, Zynga will essentially gain a ton of freedom from the social network. The game developer will not be required to run Facebook ads on its site any longer nor will they have to use Facebook credits in their games. Furthermore, Zynga will be free to develop for any platform they want to. The previous contract said they could only create games for Facebook's platform.
The downside for Zynga is that they won't be able to cross promote on Facebook. And by cross promote, they won't be allowed to run Zynga.com ads inside of Zynga games that are played on the social network. Additionally, the developer can't use e-mail addresses obtained from Facebook to promote games on their own site.
A statement from Facebook essentially says that Zynga will now be treated like any other developer that they work with. Zynga released a statement of their own on the matter, noting how they were excited to be able to expand in other directions outside of the social network.
As CNET notes, it's unclear which side made the push for the new arrangement so we'll leave that up to speculation at this point.