It looks like the social gaming world is focusing its eyes on China as more international game developers are looking into breaking into their market.

Zynga has announced its partnership with Tencent, China’s biggest provider of online games and operator of China’s QQ – a popular instant messaging service, to launch the Chinese version of CityVille, Zynga City.  The beta version of Zynga City will be launched on Pengyou, Tencent’s popular social network with over 100 million active monthly users.

“Tencent’s strategy is to offer platforms with a wide variety of games and other services,” said Jim Tang, an analyst at Shenyin & Wanguo Securities Co. in Shanghai. “They have a huge client base. If you cooperate with them, Tencent can guarantee a very large user base.”

Zynga City is being developed at Zynga China Studio, located in Beijing.  The studio, opened last year during Zynga’s global office push, consists of Chinese game developers, designers and artists, and is still looking to expand their workforce.  As for Tencent, the move to open their market to Zynga is in line with other companies also opening up their market to Chinese versions of popular games.

PopCap Games is developing a Chinese version of Plants Vs. Zombies in RenRen, a social network much like Facebook in China.  Rovio, the Finnish company that made the popular Angry Birds game, also has plans of making it into the Chinese market, though it’s still battling infringement cases filed against them by Lodsys, a Texas-based patent licensing company.

Zynga has also announced its partnership with Gate2Play, an end-to-end payment and value-added services platform based in Amman, Jordan that makes their Zynga Game Cards accessible to die-hard fans of Empires & Allies, CityVille, FarmVille, and Mafia Wars.  Available card values are $2, $5 and $10.

As for other social gaming news, PlayFirst’s Diner Dash in Facebook will be shut down after only 8 months of being in the market.  The shutdown is due to the declining number of active players of the game from 140,000 to 100,000 in just a matter of days. Star Arcade, on the other hand, launched two new games: Star Reversi and Star Rock Paper Scissors.  Star Arcade games are available in almost all app stores in various smartphones.

Google is also not trailing far behind in the social gaming scene as the company is rumored to be launching social gaming network that will charge developers just 30 per cent of the revenues they rake in.  This may cause game developers to quickly change alliances.