Zynga, the social gaming firm behind hit titles such as Farmville and Words with Friends, is gearing up to launch a new breed of gambling sites which promise to meld the virtual marketplace of its past titles with casino-style gambling.
Devised in partnership with bwin.party the games will encourage players to place real world bets to win cold, hard cash… and offering Zynga a crucial new revenue stream after it lost nearly three quarters of its value.
This period has seen the departure of a number of senior executives and an even faster erosion of its user base following a decoupling of the a once lucrative partnership with Facebook, the social media site will no longer automatically share players progress with friends, massively impinging visibility of the titles.
Zynga has been hit in recent years by a combination of poor management decisions and a general migration of players away from the PC and onto smartphones and tablets.
David Ko, Zynga’s chief operations officer, said: ““The barriers to entry for mobile are much lower than for the web.”
“We’ve seen apps that have been created by 14-year-olds go to the top of the charts. We are the Zynga of the web. We are not the Zynga of mobile.”