Card Player – Controversy has emerged in South Korea over a bill designed to combat addiction to computer games like StarCraft, the Associated Press reported. The bill, which is backed by 14 ruling party members, includes provisions to limit advertising. A separate bill would take 1 percent of the gaming industry’s revenue to create a fund to curb addiction. These might seem insignificant, but it has the gaming industry there in a dizzy. Game makers reportedly have said that the bill is a death sentence for their industry. The AP pointed out that “a law passed in 2011 that bans…

Las Vegas Sun – Charge up your iPhone, because online gambling is here. Nevada and Delaware legalized in-state online gambling this year. Laws in these two states start to bring into the open what has been a gray area in American law. The U.S. Justice Department long has insisted that the Wire Act of 1961 bans interstate gambling. And in 2006, Congress passed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, which was signed by President George W. Bush. It effectively banned financial institutions from handling any online gambling payments. Ironically, both Bush and the majority in both houses of Congress were…

iGaming Business – Paris-based casual games developer Pretty Simple’s hidden-object adventure game title Criminal Case has been named as the ‘Game of the Year 2013’ by social network Facebook. According to the VentureBeat.com website, Criminal Case topped a list of 23 games that Facebook regarded as the best of 2013. Selected by Facebook staff, the list is based on user ratings, Facebook implementation, growth and overall quality. Criminal Case, which combines crime scene investigation with sharing mechanics, grew organically during the first half of the year, while content updates and additional cases also helped drive growth in the second half…

Orlando Business Journal – The heated debate on gambling will come down to one simple thing: Do the benefits of expanded gambling outweigh the social and economic risks? The big question: Will 38,000 new jobs statewide be a good enough benefit? That still is being determined by state leaders in Tallahassee as the Senate Committee on Gaming has been hearing public opinion on the topic of expanded gaming. The committee is expected to meet again on Jan. 13 for further discussions. The state has been referring to a study by Spectrum Gaming Group that looked at several factors of how…

Poker News – PayPal, a company that processes roughly eight million real-money transactions per day, has been linked with a suspect in the UltimateBet coverup. John Mehaffey of USPoker.com discovered that PayPal shares customer information with Iovation, an online fraud prevention company headed by CEO Greg Pierson. In May, Travis Makar, an UltimateBet whistle-blower, released these audiotapes that implicate UltimateBet founder and CEO Pierson along with Russ Hamilton in the cover-up of the infamous cheating scandal. According to PayPal’s private policy, Iovation is on a list of “non-exclusive examples of the actual third parties to whom we currently disclose your…

iGaming Business – The UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) has reported an increase in the average amount British households spent on gambling during 2012. In its Family Spending Report, the ONS said that an average of £3.20 (€3.80/5.25) was spent on gambling each week in 2012, an increase of 50p on the previous year. The gambling figure was more than the average British household amount spent a week on going to the cinema, concerts, theme parks, museums and the theatre combined. The report revealed that all areas in the UK lost money on gambling, apart from the north west…