Zynga’s Real-Money Online Casino Is Now Live In The UK

I used to work as a developer in the gambling industry in the UK so have a bit of experience in this field.<p>The UK gambling industry has done a really good job of self regulating, they know that if they are too exploitative and do dirty tricks to get more money from customers, the government would step in and regulate them.<p>We spent a lot of time building features to give customers some control. For example, users could set hard limits to stop themselves playing too much, or they could ban themselves from the site. If users were playing for too long, we'd also ban them from the site temporarily. We also implemented a lot of features which would stop them banning themselves and then rejoining using their spouses account.<p>It'll be really interesting to see if Zynga plays by the same rules.

Great just what we need.<p>This shows no creativity, initiative, grace or innovation. It's not addressing any lacking market demands, they are just shoulder barging their way in and taking their slice. To me this is just a cash grab. An unapologetic cash grab in the middle of a recession.

So what they did was add a Zynga scheme (not much besides a few colors changed) to the partypoker.com client. How is this something that will save the company? For how long have they been talking up their real-money gambling stuff with the market eating it all up...

How on earth is the FarmVille-branded page of cute-fluffy-animals-with-gambling legal, or even just acceptable?<p>Screenshot here:<p><a href="http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/screen-shot-2013-04-03-at-07-35-52.png?w=640&#38;h=471" rel="nofollow">http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/screen-s...</a><p>I'm genuinely shocked.

Considering one of their most successful games has been Zynga Poker for a while, it's surprising it took this long.<p>What they do have, however, is a very captive network audience. Assuming they have the right targeting, they should be able to run interstitials driving players from their free games (especially Zynga Poker, Zynga Slots, Zynga Slingo) over to these sites at a low cost. You don't have to agree with their creativity to see that this is a no-brainer for them.

Time to buy Zynga stocks?<p>Who is surprised by this move? Zynga was always an unoriginal and uncreative company. This seems the smartest greedy execution in this context.

How does this differ to any of the other hundreds of online casinos in the UK?

depressing news. People don't have money to waste right now.