Zynga to offer real-money online poker in 2013

[The Buzz]

The rumors are true. Zynga plans to offer real-money online poker in 2013 in any regulated environment where it can get a license (obv not U.S. - at least not yet).

Do you think Zynga can succeed? Or is the market already saturated? Will players trust a site with their own real money when the site has only been dealing in play money for a few years?

http://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/...in-early-2013/

[Anthony]

I maybe wrong here, but I am not entirely convinced that Zynga social poker players are going to convert to real money players in the numbers that they anticipate.

[TheGooner]

The market thinks that Zynga's facebook / poker strategy is little more than hot air ... from $9b at IPO to just $3b today.
http://news.yahoo.com/analysts-see-m...4--sector.html

Zynga might manage to do it ... but it seems that ZYnga is suffering from not really having a mobile offering.
The increasing use of mobile phones to access facebook is also negatively affecting Zynga player numbers.

[rak]

I maybe wrong here, but I am not entirely convinced that Zynga social poker players are going to convert to real money players in the numbers that they anticipate.

I agree with you, totally agree. There will be some cross over, but at the rate we think. Eg.. some games are just played for, for fun. And these newbies players who come into real online poker, are going to attack it with the same care free verocity as they do on Zynga poker. Sharks are going to eat them up, and leave a bad taste in the newbies mouth.

And what's stopping a player on Zynga already hunting out stars or GR88 Poker *shamless plug* to play for real cash.

[the_soc]

By the time their share price fell by a third they also realized their business model of social gambling doesn't produce much money. Now they're more or less changing course and becoming main-stream... but managing real money poker is a lot more complex than social gaming. You can't fake-it-till-you-make-it. Personally, I don't have much confidence they'll know how to manage real money poker - they'll need to re-staff the whole company with people who have experience... in the US, for online play, that'll be an HR puzzle.

[G_F_Brown]

It will be interesting to see if they make a move into the online bingo market (for me anyway), Zynga's social presence is impressive but I have to agree that converting this to money players will be a much harder task than maybe they anticipate. Other free to play social gaming sites have tried this and unfortunately failed.