Facebook launches virtual bingo game offering real cash prizes

Controls will prevent anyone aged under 18 from gambling on Bingo Friendzy.

Facebook's Bingo & Slots Friendzy will not be regulated by the UK gambling commission, as its developer, Gamesys, is based in Gibraltar

Facebook has made its first move into online gambling in the UK, launching a virtual bingo machine that offers real cash prizes.
Britons aged 18 and over will be able to stake real money on the new Facebook game, dubbed Bingo Friendzy. The US social network plans to introduce virtual slot machines in the coming weeks.
Facebook insists that its controls will prevent anyone aged under 18 from gambling, but the move is likely to provoke some concern from parents whose children spend vast amounts of time on the site.
Bingo Friendzy has been developed by the gambling giant Gamesys, which runs several big-name jackpot sites including the Sun Bingo and Caesars Casino.
When a user signs up to Bingo Friendzy, they are asked to enter their personal details and confirm their date of birth. They are then asked to enter bank account details and make a deposit of between £10 and £500 to begin playing.
The game will not be regulated by the UK gambling commission because Gamesys is based in Gibraltar. The government has said it plans to make any company offering gambling services in the UK comply with the country's regulatory regime.
According to media regulator Ofcom, nearly two thirds of internet users in the UK are on Facebook. The average UK user spends six and a half hours a month on Facebook, which was the most popular internet destination behind Google search in March.
A spokeswoman for Facebook said: "Facebook is a place that allows people to connect and share. Real money gaming is a popular and well-regulated activity in the UK and we are allowing a partner to offer their games to adult users on the Facebook platform in a safe and controlled manner."
Facebook said it had no immediate plans to expand the venture to other markets, but the site could partner with other companies to launch new games in the UK.
Many countries outside the UK have more burdensome regulatory regimes for online gambling. In the US, for example, online gambling is largely prohibited in all but some states.
The venture into online gambling had long been expected for Facebook, which generates a growing amount of its worldwide revenues from gaming.
In the three months to 30 June, £123m ($192m) out of Facebook's £760m ($1.2bn) in revenues were generated from payments made in games such as Zynga's Farmville and Mafia Wars.
Licensed UK gambling is forecast to reach £10.0bn by 2012, according to the market intelligence firm H2 Gambling Capital. European interactive gambling was worth €8.3bn (£6.6bn) in 2009 and is expected to reach €12.6bn (£10bn) by 2012.

There's A Major Flaw In Zynga's Plan To Fix Itself

Zynga has a plan to fix itself that involves becoming a more mobile-focused company and putting more resources behind the "With Friends" brand.
It has no choice but to figure out mobile. Zynga's mobile users are growing three times faster than its web users. Meanwhile, Zynga's Facebook users have dropped 16% from last year to Q2 this year.
But creating more "with friends" branded games might not be the smartest strategy. Zynga has only ever had one real success in that category, Words with Friends. The rest of its attempts have gone bust.

Words With Friends currently has about 5.7 million daily active users (DAUs), according to AppData. But every social game it has launched since, Hanging with Friends, Scramble with Friends and Matching with Friends, have petered out.
"None of those games are or have been successful," a source close to the company says. "Scramble DAU is down almost 50% over several months and Matching With Friends couldn't hold on to #1 spot for more than two days."

Zynga has tried replicating its smash hits before without much luck. Farmville, which first put the gaming company on the map, has led to a slew of other "ville" attempts, like Castleville, Cityville, YoVille, PetVille and FishVille. Most have not been able to attract the same user-base as Farmville.
"The 'With Friends' network is the same strategy as ville games," says the source "Pick a franchise that has one hit and double down on the franchise as each game performs worse and worse."
What should really have Zynga concerned, and has gone unsaid by the Journal, and others, is that Zynga has never built its own successful mobile game. It bought Words with Friends. It bought Farmville. It bought Draw Something, which was a successful mobile game.
Even if it doubles down on a semi-successful brand, it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be able to build a successful mobile game.

EA sues Zynga for copyright infringement

Electronic Arts is suing Zynga for copyright infringement, claiming the social gaming giant copied one of their games.
According to a complaint filed in U.S. District Court in California, EA alleges Zynga's new Facebook game The Ville is an "unmistakable copy" of The Sims Social.
"The similarities go well beyond any superficial resemblance," says Lucy Bradshaw, general manager of EA's Maxis label, the creators of The Sims Social. "Zynga's design choices, animations, visual arrangements and character motions and actions have been directly lifted from The Sims Social. The copying was so comprehensive that the two games are, to an uninitiated observer, largely indistinguishable."
In a statement responding to the lawsuit, Zynga general counsel Reggie Davis says the company plans to "defend our rights to the fullest extent possible."
"It's unfortunate that EA thought that this was an appropriate response to our game, and clearly demonstrates a lack of understanding of basic copyright principles," says Davis. "It's also ironic that EA brings this suit shortly after launching SimCity Social which bears an uncanny resemblance to Zynga's CityVille game.
Unveiled in June, The Ville allows players to create avatars and "build the home of their dreams," designing the interior and creating avatars that socialize with friends.
The Sims Social, launched last August on Facebook, lets players create their own Sim and start virtual lives on the social network.
The lawsuit underscores broader accusations that Zynga rips off other games. For example, in January, Tiny Tower creators NimbleBit called out Zynga for its title Dream Heights, Joystiq reported.
"Good luck with your game, we are looking forward to inspiring you with our future games," said NimbleBit.
EA's Bradshaw says the publisher is "taking a stand" against Zynga and the allegations of copying.
"By calling Zynga out on this illegal practice, we hope to have a secondary effect of protecting the rights of other creative studios who don't have the resources to protect themselves."

Gaming, Tablet PCs

Wikipad specs get real: 10.1-inch 1,280 x 800 display, 1.4 GHz Tegra 3, Jelly Bean

By Steve Dent posted Jul 31st 2012 6:14AM

The Wikipad gaming tablet has been ticking off boxes on its way to becoming a real product, and after bedding down with Gaikai game streaming and settling in to a 10.1-inch form factor, the rest of the hardware is now set. The chunky handheld will brandish an IPS display with 1,280 x 800 resolution, NVIDIA Tegra 3 T30 quad-core 1.4GHz processor, 1GB of DDR2 RAM, at least 16GB storage and Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. Other notable items include 8-megapixel rear / 2-megapixel front cameras, six hours continuous gaming battery life and a 2D-only screen instead of the 3D originally touted -- at least, for the first model. The controller remains the same with a pair of triggers, bumpers, joysticks and start/select buttons, and will cover the slate's speakers and route sound out the front. The rest of the story is yet to come, namely exactly what that price will be and when you'll actually be able to pew-pew with it, but the company has promised to 'fess up soon. Meanwhile, though airy for a tablet at 560 grams (1.2 pounds), it's not exactly PS Vita or Nintendo 3DS XL territory -- but then a heavyweight contender could be exactly what handheld gaming needs.

Droid X360: when a split personality is awesome

Meet one of the most audacious pieces of kit we've seen — the Droid X360, a PlayStation Vita knock-off named very closely to the Xbox 360, running on Android and packaged with Nintendo and Sega emulators.

We're not sure how this is allowed.
Lon Xun Software in China announced the new handheld console, the Droid X360, Which boasts a form factor that looks exactly like the PlayStation Vita and has a name that's suspiciously close to the Xbox 360. The console runs on Android 4.04 (Ice Cream Sandwich) and has nine emulators built in, according to Chinese publication Shanzhaiben (Google Translate).
On it, you can play games from the Nintendo 64, Nintendo Game Boy Advance and Game Boy Color, Super NES, Sony PlayStation 1, Sega Mega Drive and Sega Game Gear.

Unlike the Vita, the back doesn't sport a touch panel.

Specs include a five-inch 800x480p capacitive touchscreen, an A10 1.5GHz processor, 512M RAM, 8GB onboard storage, plus a MicroSD expansion slot up to 32GB, Mini USB, HDMI-out, a 0.3-megapixel camera on the front and a two-megapixel camera on the back, microphone and audio-out and a 2800mAh battery.
Knock-off or not, it looks like a really feature-packed gadget. Alas, pricing and availability doesn't seem to be available at this time. We suspect there would be some legal issues, anyway.

Piracy forced Dead Trigger Android game to go free

With 400m activated devices and another 1m added every day, Android is on a roll. So why are many games developers still wary of porting their iOS titles to Google's platform? Piracy is a key reason.
Developer Madfinger Games is the latest company to fuel the debate, after changing its Dead Trigger game from paid to free on the Google Play Store. The zombie-themed first-person shooter launched earlier in July for $0.99.
"Regarding price drop. HERE is our statement. The main reason: piracy rate on Android devices, that was unbelievably high," the company posted on its official Dead Trigger Facebook page, comparing the game to its previous title Shadowgun.
"At first we intend to make this game available for as many people as possible - that's why it was for as little as buck. - It was much less than 8$ for SHADOWGUN but on the other hand we didn't dare to provide it for free, since we hadn't got XP with free-to-play format so far. - However, even for one buck, the piracy rate is soooo giant, that we finally decided to provide DEAD TRIGGER for free."
The company's post was likely in response to criticism from players who had paid $0.99 for Dead Trigger in its first few weeks on the Google Play Store. Pocket Gamer reports that a number had posted one-star reviews after the change, angry at having paid for a game that is now free.
Madfinger stresses in its Facebook post that Dead Trigger "is not FREEMIUM, it always was and still remains FREE-TO-PLAY", in an effort to head off suggestions that it's pushing players to pay for items using in-app purchases. "We stand up for this statement, because all members of our team are playing (and enjoying) DEAD TRIGGER without IAP."
The iOS version of Dead Trigger remains a $0.99 paid game, although like the Android version it also uses IAP.
Madfinger isn't the first developer to talk publicly about high levels of piracy for its Android games. In April 2012, Sports Interactive said that in the first two weeks after it launched its Football Manager Handheld game for Android, its piracy rate was 9:1 – that's one sale for every nine illegal downloads.
"There's no working copy protection on the platform currently, so it's pretty easy for someone to get it working," SI's' Miles Jacobsen told Eurogamer at the time. "The platform is also very popular in some countries where there's a larger piracy problem than in others."
It was SI's first game for Android, and possibly its last. "If it doesn't hit targets, then we won't be doing another one for the platform - that's a simple business decision though for a couple of months' time."
Earlier, Korean developer com2uS had said some games see piracy rates as high as 98% on Android, while US developer Appy Entertainment's FaceFighter Gold game saw a piracy rate of 70:1 on Android versus 3:1 on iOS.
In September 2011, analyst firm Yankee Group polled 75 Android developers in the US on the subject of piracy, and found 27% saying it's a huge problem, and 26% saying it's somewhat of a problem – meaning that 47% aren't as fussed, presumably.
However, a third of developers questioned said they believed piracy had cost them more than $10,000 in revenue, while 32% noted that it increases their support costs for apps and games.
It's important not to rush to conclusions on the subject of piracy, whatever media you're talking about. Figuring out what proportion of illegal downloads represent lost sales (versus people who would have never bought the game) is notoriously tricky, for example.
Meanwhile, high piracy rates on Android do not mean it is impossible to make money as a games developer: in-app purchases and advertising offer revenue streams for free-to-play games, although as Apple has found out in recent days, IAP systems are targets for piracy too.
Even so, Google can't afford to ignore the complaints of paid app developers about high piracy rates on Android. In fact, there's already evidence that it is working to address the matter.
A new feature in its Android Jelly Bean 4.1 software is app encryption, which the Android developers blog describes thus:
"From Jelly Bean and forward, paid apps in Google Play are encrypted with a device-specific key before they are delivered and stored on the device. We know you work hard building your apps. We work hard to protect your investment."
Madfinger Games clearly hasn't given up on Android – switching to a free-to-play model for Dead Trigger to see if it can make money that way.
But the company's experience represents a challenge to Google: Android has huge scale, and the latest devices are more than capable of running impressive games. But anything that makes developers worry about getting a return on their investment – piracy included – means less of these games coming to Android.