Breaking news: Zynga partners with bwin.party for real money launch
Zynga partners with European egaming giant to launch poker and casino offering " companies to work together on development of Farmvillle-branded slots.
Zynga is to partner with bwin.party to launch its first real-money gambling offering, due to go live in the first half of 2013, the social gaming business has announced.
Under the terms of the agreement both companies will partner to launch a full suite of UK-facing gambling products including poker and a portfolio of more than 180 casino games including slots, roulette and blackjack. Zynga’spoker offering will join bwin.party’s poker network (no date was given as to when), while the companies will work together to develop a FarmVille-branded slot game.
The UK-facing offering will operate under bwin.party’s Gibraltar egaming licence, meaning that Zynga will not be required to apply for regulatory approval, a bwin.party statement said.
Barry Cottle, Zynga’s executive vice president of corporate and business development, said: “Bringing together Zynga’s expertise in social gaming with the top international real money gaming operator is the best way to create the highest quality gaming experiences for our players in the UK.
“Partnering with an established leader like bwin.party is a strategic and prudent way for us to enter a key RMG market while giving local players the real money games they’ve been asking us for,” he added.
Commenting on the agreement bwin.party co-CEOs Jim Ryan and Norbert Teufelberger said: “Today’s announcement is another example of our success in leveraging our assets through strategic blue-chip partners.
“Zynga is the world’s leader in social games with hundreds of millions of active players worldwide and a significant player base in the UK. We are delighted to have been selected as their chosen partner for this important step in their evolution, and hope to expand our relationship into other products and markets,” the pair concluded.
Just as Zynga have made moves to enter the online gambling space, bwin.party has also recently entered the social sector by setting up social gaming subsidiary Win Interactive, led by former Mytopia CEO Barak Rabinowitz. The division signed a partnership with social sports betting operator Nordeus in September this year and has launched Poker Friends, an iOS app, in partnership with Israeli operator Big Blue Parrot.
Speaking exclusively to SCi this evening, a spokesman for bwin.party said: “We are pleased to have been selected as Zynga’s partner for this important step in their evolution, and hope to expand our relationship into other products and markets.”
The partnership is the first update on Zynga’s real-money gambling project since the company confirmed the appointment of former 888 executive Maytal Ginzburg Olsha as chief operating officer for new markets in August. This followed chief executive Mark Pincus’ announced that the company was to enter the gambling sector after releasing its results for the second quarter of the year in July.
During the company’s earnings call for its third-quarter results, Pincus welcomed Ginzburg Olsha to the business, describing her as having “great domain knowledge and operating experience.”
The news comes less than a day after it revealed plans to cut its workforce by 5% as part of a cost reduction drive. An internal memo from Pincus, seen by SCi, revealed that the company’s studios in Boston, the United Kingdom and Japan were to be shut down entirely, while around 100 staff were laid off from its development centre in Austin.
In his note to staff Pincus explained that the redundancies, alongside moves to ” implement more stringent budget and resource allocation around new games and partner projects,” would help make the company more profitable and allow it “to reinvest in great games and [the] Zynga network on web and mobile.”