Social game developer Zynga has big plans to extend its reach, as that includes a new game called CityVille and a deal with Yahoo for game expansion. The deal was established some time ago but was temporarily downsized, in the wake of Zynga’s success with Facebook.

“Users can now play and share games such as Mafia Wars and Fishville across Yahoo’s homepage, games site, e-mail and messenger system. The new relationship doesn’t affect Zynga’s current set-up with Facebook, which involves millions of faithful gamers. “

The now beta Facebook-aimed CityVille has been declared  Zynga’s most interactive game yet, but that doesn’t prevent  it from helping to revive Yahoo’s once dominant gaming platform.  Furthermore, the search engine giant is not targeting Zynga alone, as it will also launch an improved version of its Sketch-a-Search function, a limited trail of its Local Offers program involving among others Groupon and GiltCity, a new social-network integrated Yahoo Messenger and more. Yahoo is becoming more social then ever these days, as it’s getting involved with all the biggest trends as also covered here.

Going back to Zynga and of course its long time rival Big Fish Games, VentureBeat profiles the direction the casual game developer is heading to; a different one from Zynga’s. As CEO Jeremy Lewis said, the company is not planning to acquire social game and app developing companies, but rather expand its reach based on market demand. Additionally, Big Fish Games expanded today overseas with five new localized language portals and support for 12 additional currencies, which may help the downloadable game developer to reach up to 300M new customers.