From Las Vegas Review Journal The Empire put a hit on the Mafia and buried the farm. Two years after Caesars Entertainment Corp. perplexed Wall Street by acquiring social gaming operation Playtika, the casino giant has moved past rival Zynga Inc. to the top of the business model. Social casino games are free to play on the Internet, through Facebook and other platforms. Customers have the option of paying a nominal fee — often less than $1 — to acquire thousands of gaming tokens to increase their virtual bankroll. Apparently, those pennies add up. One Wall Street analyst estimated social…

There has been much  commentary in the press and on blogs about Zynga’s  anticipated and perhaps rather late entry into the Internet gambling(iGaming) business.  This topic has been discussed for years and it is finally here. Although Zynga is the 600 pound social/freemium game company in the room they are not the first cross over company to have a social/freemium business and an Internet gambling business under one roof. Gamesys’ Jackpotjoy was one of the first “true” crossover entries into the combined social and iGaming  realm. However, Gamesys has come from the opposite direction having been in the  UK Internet gambling…

Social casino gamemakers like Zynga are moving into real-money gambling. The reverse is happening as well, and a startup called BlueBat wants to help casinos move into the world of social games. Today, Vancouver, Canada-based BlueBat is unveiling its BlueBox social gamification engine. With it, BlueBat will help casinos and online gambling game developers reach more users. In effect, BlueBox will add social features to online gambling games. The idea is to equip the gambling companies so they can more effectively compete in the game business. Rivals include Roar Engine, Enteraction, Akamon, and social casino players such as DoubleDown Interactive,…

Facebook was Zynga’s path to glory — the Facebook game FarmVille, a virtual agribusiness, put the San Francisco social-gaming company on the map. But since its $7 billion IPO in 2011, Zynga has been having a rough time of it, culminating in the axing of 520 employees, or 18 percent of its workforce, last month. On July 1, the job cuts reached founding CEO Mark Pincus, who will be replaced by former Microsoft Xbox chief Don Mattrick. (Pincus will stay on as chief products officer.) The change was enough to boost Zynga’s stock a bit, but on Thursday the company…

From Poker News – Congressman Joe Barton (R-Tex.) said Tuesday that he believes once more populous states get involved in Internet poker, it will lead to legislation at the federal level within the next few years. Participating in a conference call hosted by the Poker Players Alliance, Barton, who introduced the Internet Poker Freedom Act of 2013 last week, indicated that he didn’t believe there will ever be a point where enough states pursue regulation to make a federal bill unnecessary. Instead, he sees the spreading of online poker on a state-by-state basis igniting more and more people to join…

From Intergame – Lithuania’s regulated land-based gaming operators are hoping the government will take action to either regulate online gaming or to strictly enforce a ban. There is significant debate within the country over whether online gambling ought to be regulated. Today, i-gaming is deemed illegal but in reality has been allowed to emerge as a rival to the land-based sector through a lack of adequate controls. Like elsewhere, land-based operators have found that competition from unlicensed, unregulated online operators to has had a significant impact upon their business. InterGame has learned, however, that a new draft gaming law offering…