The Several Journeys of Reemus: Chapter 4
From Jay is Games
by LDora on January 28, 2012 04:00 AM
by LDora on January 28, 2012 04:00 AM
by Tricky on January 28, 2012 02:00 AM
by Colin Cupp on January 28, 2012 12:24 AM
This week’s Flash Game Friday winner is Greens Survive Only When Reds Die by Oleksii Zagorodnii!

You have to love a game with instructions in the title, and this title pretty much says it all- Greens Survive Only When Reds Die!
The object is to get the green guy through the door. Problem is, you have to make sure to kill the red guys in order to get the door open…without killing the green guy, of course!
Greens Survive Only When Reds Die is a great platformer witha unique gameplay twist- congratulations Oleksii!
There is one person in my team, this is me :). I live in Kyiv, Ukraine. I do programming and art by myself, but I know nothing about writing music, so the music for most of my games is created by Alexander Ahura. He is a really great composer and I’m happy to work with him.
I’ve been making (actually, trying to make) games since I was in school. Back in those days I used Game Maker and then BlitzMax, but never actually finishing anything. I completed my first Flash game in the summer of 2010, and since then I have created six more games, all of which can be found at my site: friedpixel.com.
I really love platform games and wanted to create something original and fun in this genre. The idea of playing with lots of characters at the same time looked promising. However, I saw a few released games where players controlled several characters simultaneously, so I decided to add a twist, and make some of these controlled characters ‘bad’, setting a task for players to kill them.
The main challenge for me is my laziness. I’m not a full-time game developer. I have a dayjob and sometimes it’s very difficult to start working on a game, especially when the prototype and all of the experiments are done and there are lots of things and polishing to be done to complete the final version.
I love to create different arcade and platform games. I also enjoy playing platform games in Flash and on mobile devices the most. Sometimes I also play some big AAA games on XBox, the last were Gears of War and Skyrim.
Usually it takes 2-3 months to finish a game. There is not so much work in the type of games I create, but I can’t spend a lot of time on them. There is no particular process; I just do the things that need to be done to create the game.
I really admire indie developers who create original and fun games, especially those who share their experience and help less experienced game creators. I would name Adam Atomic (Canabalt and Flixel, my favorite Flash engine) and Johnny-K (Cover Orange, Ragdoll Cannon).
At the first stages of development it’s really fun to try new things and see how game mechanic starts working. Later, when the game is released, I like to read reviews from players on different sites. It’s really great to know that some people from the different corners of the Earth like your creation.
Everyone is making mobile games now. I thought that I also may try to create something in this field and started new arcade shooter for iPhone with my friend. Unfortunately, we didn’t make it as quickly as we would have liked, and it’s still a little too early to draw any conclusions about the success of the game.
Thanks Oleksii, and congratulations again on winning Flash Game Friday!
© Colin Cupp for MochiLand, 2012. | Permalink | No comment
Add to del.icio.us
Search blogs linking this post with Technorati
Want more on these topics ? Browse the archive of posts filed under Developer Feed, Developer Spotlight, Flash Game Friday, Game Showcase, MochiLand Topics, Publisher Feed.
by noreply@blogger.com (Kingmush) on January 27, 2012 11:00 PM
by LDora on January 27, 2012 10:30 PM
at January 27, 2012 10:00 PM
by Blar on January 27, 2012 07:30 PM
by noreply@blogger.com (Kingmush) on January 27, 2012 07:00 PM
by admin on January 27, 2012 06:07 PM
by admin on January 27, 2012 04:20 PM
by Eric on January 27, 2012 03:16 PM
Continue Reading about Minoto – Ugly Duckling 2
by admin on January 27, 2012 01:58 PM
by admin on January 27, 2012 01:39 PM
by Andy Moore on January 27, 2012 09:28 AM
(Check out the first 4 days here)
It’s Thursday! Party time!
In these devlogs I’m trying to avoid describing the core mechanic of the game; I’m not absolutely certain it’s final and I’m still experimenting. So if things seem a bit vague: don’t worry! It’s intentional.
I didn’t get a whole lot done today. Probably only put in about 2 hours of work, but that’s allright. The big changes for today? A brand new game mode, and some tweaks to the scoring and gameplay start/end. Most exciting though: solidified an artistic relationship!
I want to stress here that I put a huge amount of value in artistic direction, and significantly less value in actual artistic execution. Not to be unfair to the more artistically minded, but to be frank: a simple artist is a dime-a-dozen. I get emails from talented folk in, well, third world countries on a monthly basis. All they need to work is a few measly dollars, specific direction, and plenty of hand holding.
For example, you might ask for an image of a penguin. An artist might say “sure! but… How big should the beak be? Should the eyes be big or small? What palette do you want to use?”… The level of hand-holding here is very aggravating. It’s like the easiest way to communicate is to just mock-up all the art assets myself and just have them draw over it, but better.
And that’s exactly what I don’t want. Sure, I have preferences and intended artistic themes for my games. But I also have enough experience to know I don’t know what’s best, and I should just shut the hell up and leave it to the pros. This is one of the reasons that I fawn over amazing designers like Greg Wohlwend and Dan Cook so much: They can completely design – from the ground up – a projects entire image, and execute on it with amazing talent and precision. I wish I knew appropriate artistic lingo to drool over them professionally.
Another name to add to that list is Sven Bergström - an indie developer with a lot of passion from South Africa (3rd world status there is a coincidence! I swear!). I’d say he’s a newcomer, a rising star on the horizon – but really he’s just new to my personal network; he’s been making games for longer than I have, and knows a lot more about – oh, let’s say mobile development, than I do. I wish I knew he existed sooner! He’s the one that helped revamp the visual design on my personal blog here a few months ago, and he’s super talented in all that he does. I’m excited to have him on board!
Sven just started working on this mysteriously-titled “Word Game” yesterday, and I asked if he could put together an image to share with you.
Check that out! Character design for the game. This is the first stage of evolution for our lead character! I love reading about this kind of stuff. I learned things today about character design!
When I take a look at most word games, there seems to be two camps.
On one side is the person that likes to find long words. These are the people that like Boggle, or a lazy Sunday spent staring at a Scrabble board. In the mobile space, you pretty much just look at the games that have no time limits or external pressures. The goal is to be your best. I like to put SpellTower in this category.
On the other side is the person that likes action, and would be just as happy dazzling you with an array of 3-letter-words. These types of players tend to play the faster-paced, more hectic games. Games like PuzzleJuice, or tournament Speed Scrabble. Sure, there’s bonuses in it if you have long words, but the score to be gained by just going fast is the prime target here.
I like both styles of play, and I’ve been trying to work them into a single game mode. This has been failing! Balancing long words versus big “combo multipliers” is very tricky indeed. I fought my urges to unite these two camps and instead built a second mode into the game.
Now, without changing any mechanics (just the scoring algorithm), I have two different game modes: one that rewards long words, and one that rewards lots of small words in rapid succession.
One thing that is a common occurance in word games is that brick-wall ending. Maybe you have a word half-spelled, maybe you are massaging your temples as your brain cascades through all the potential letter combinations. Then BAM! The game suddenly ends, your tiles disappear, and you are left holding nothing.
I think this ending is hugely anti-climatic and I really dislike it. I reworked the game to instead allow you one more super-move after the timer expires. Sure, you can sit there for as long as you want and hunt down the best possible word – but in Speed mode, your combo multiplier soon runs out and you’ll not gain much for it. In LongWord mode, it’s the final cherry on top of your sundae.
I’m playtesting this new feature now; I hope some variant of it will stay make it into the final game.
On a smaller, but similar note: the big mean ol’ nasty countdown clock doesn’t start ticking until you’ve actually made your first word. Terrain in this game changes a lot in just a few seconds, so being able to plan out your first move isn’t a huge advantage.
I got TestFlight setup so I can start an actual iOS closed-beta program for the game, and get some feedback before launch. I also made my first iPhone build (so far it’s been iPad only) and I was very pleased to see that the game was simulating nicely without any modifications at all. I’ll have to actually see it on-device before I declare it a success, though.
There’s a few mobile-specific features in the game now too; things I consider housekeeping: rotation locks, proper (mockup) icons and loading images, pivot behaviour hooks, specific code for android “back” button mis-presses, and customary stuff like remembering to pause the countdown timer if you swap out of the game (and reducing the game to 1FPS in the background, so it doesn’t suck up your battery). Whenever folks talk about mobile development having a lot more “gotchas,” this kind of work makes it seem very true. However, I did all of these tweaks in about 30 minutes of code. The only trouble they’ll give anyone is if they simply forget about them before launch!
I think the most notable thing about today is that I spent way more time playtesting than I did coding. I think that’s a very good sign.
by Eric on January 27, 2012 09:14 AM
Continue Reading about Gotmail – Rival
by admin on January 27, 2012 09:12 AM
by Eric on January 27, 2012 08:05 AM
Continue Reading about Kingdom Rush
by White Wolf on January 27, 2012 08:03 AM
Continue Reading about Civilizations Wars: Ice Legends
by noreply@blogger.com (Kingmush) on January 27, 2012 08:00 AM
by White Wolf on January 27, 2012 07:56 AM
Continue Reading about Rolling Hero 2
by admin on January 27, 2012 07:24 AM
by Renegade on January 27, 2012 06:51 AM
Fans of the Diablo games will definitely want to take a look at this.
The upcoming Dungeon King: Dreadstorm Keep is set for release this Monday, priced at $10, and Bulletproof Arcade just sent over a gameplay trailer and some stylish screenshots from the game.
Like Diablo, or the more recent Torchlight, Dungeon King puts you in a dynamically generated dungeon with hordes of monsters to hack’n'slash your way through. There’s treasure to be found along the way, but your primary mission is to take out the dungeon master Vulkhan.
There’s plenty of reason to mow through the scores of monsters you’ll be meeting on your adventure, as in all RPGs. Namely, the exp and loot you get from battles. A total of 9 skills can be improved as you progress, with additional perks for maxing out any given skill. We’re also promised “Magic-Infused Axes, Amulets, Rings and Belts.”
Bulletproof Arcade told us that they’d eventually like to include a multiplayer co-op mode, and mentioned the game is intended to be the first in a episodic series. If the game plays as well as it looks, we’re guessing players will be demanding those plans are brought forward in a hurry.
We’ll have a full review of the game available on release day, but for now you can watch the trailer here.
by joye on January 27, 2012 06:00 AM
by JohnB on January 27, 2012 05:00 AM
by noreply@blogger.com (Kingmush) on January 26, 2012 06:00 PM
by Renegade on January 26, 2012 05:57 PM
Do you know someone who cheats in online games? A new study suggests there’s a strong chance they’re also less than honest offline too.
Popcap’s 2011 social Gaming Survey found that around 8% of players admitted to cheating in online games, with males marginally more likely to play unfairly. By far the biggest group of cheats were the 18-29 demographic.
Of the gaming cheats, half of those had also cheated in a relationship, and just over half had cheated on tests or exams.
Interestingly, cheats were also more likely to make legitimate item purchases in free-to-play games, where the item gave them an ingame advantage.
The picture being painted here is that dishonesty in one area of a person’s life is a strong indicator of overall dishonesty. A lack of regard for players in online games appears to correlate with a lack of regard for other people in the offline world – which may not be surprising, but is definitely worth remembering if you know someone who hacks in games.
by Eric on January 26, 2012 05:24 PM
Continue Reading about Abroy – Bachelor’s Mystery
by elle on January 26, 2012 05:00 PM
by pozirk on January 26, 2012 04:26 PM
It’s been awhile…
So, I have added Gaps Solitaire to All-in-One Solitaire game.
And I’m planning to add at least two more solitaire games: Spider and Free Cell.
I have moved website to another hoster, so it took me some days and nights to configure my first self-managed VPS.
We are working “hard” on Dolly The Sheep game.
There are still not all the graphics ready, but we are making levels already.
I think, I will be able to release a couple of smaller games, before we finish with DTS.
Here are some videos with gameplay:
by White Wolf on January 26, 2012 03:08 PM
Continue Reading about Hands of War TD
by artbegotti on January 26, 2012 03:00 PM
by Eric on January 26, 2012 02:13 PM
Continue Reading about This is The Only Level 3
by White Wolf on January 26, 2012 02:04 PM
Continue Reading about Subtle Energy 2
by Eric on January 26, 2012 01:20 PM
Continue Reading about Kedili Oda
by White Wolf on January 26, 2012 09:02 AM
Continue Reading about The Visitor: Massacre at camp happy
by noreply@blogger.com (Kingmush) on January 26, 2012 09:00 AM
by White Wolf on January 26, 2012 08:02 AM
Continue Reading about Island Tribe 2
by Renegade on January 26, 2012 06:15 AM
Earlier we showed you NimbleBit’s letter to Zynga after the company appeared to heavily “borrow” elements of their game.
If you thought it might be coincidence, you’ll want to take a look at a new article by Edge magazine, which charts the various accusations of plagiarism Zynga has faced on their rise through the casual gaming charts.
As if the apparent disregard for IP owned by other companies wasn’t enough, Edge also notes that the company won a case against Vostu a year ago, for plagiarizing Zynga’s games.
You can read the full article here.
by Andy Moore on January 26, 2012 04:43 AM
Hey everyone! I haven’t spoken a lot about game dev recently, but I started doing a side project and thought it would be good devlog material.
Last Saturday (January 21st) I topped off my evening by rocking all the high score tables in the new word game, PuzzleJuice. I really love that game, and as I drifted off to sleep that night I started thinking about how easy it would be to make a word game of my own.
(EDIT: My girlfriend informs me that I had the idea a week before PuzzleJuice, but my brain has re-written history and I don’t believe her.)
I mean, how hard can it be? Get a little dictionary of words, spell some things out… Should be no problem, right? I decided to find out. Laying there in bed, I wasn’t heart-set on releasing a commercial product; I just wanted to see if I could make something up quick.
I spent my morning coming up with a theme. I wanted something casual and cute; my girlfriend suggested penguins as a central theme, so penguins it was! I thought up a quick and easy central mechanic (a variation on a Boggle-like interface) and started prototyping what was initally dubbed “Word Fishing.”
I spent a lot of time toying around with different UI design elements, and fleshing out the codebase for what was to come (game-jam style, not proper-engineering style). I only put in 3 or 4 hours this day, but it was good start. Most of all, I got a bunch of research done on what lay ahead of me.
On Monday I setup my first dictionary-lookup chunk of code – an older, out-of-date word database with an OK search algorithm. The best part was that it was mostly cut-n-paste from some fellow devs – it pays to network!
I then moved on to actually implementing the gameplay. I got some temporary art in place, implemented a simple mouse click-to-select interface, and was able to actually play what I had envisioned less than 24 hours before. Hooray! Prototype #1: Complete.
As I was playing the game into the evening, I was surprised at how fun it was. I mean, I love Boggle to start with – but this new twist on mechanics seemed to be playing out really well. There was no timer implemented yet, so it felt somewhat freeform… That would go on the to-do list.
It was around this point I decided to make this a proper commercial application!
Knowing a word game would work much better as a mobile application, I started eyeballing my 2-year-old Nexus One (Android phone). I’ve never made a mobile application before… could I do it?
Monday night was spent downloading Android development interfaces, debugging tools, and drivers of various sorts – the whole time being hand-held by the wonderful FlashDevelop documentation. That’s right, I just pressed “New Project > Mobile App” and my folders came pre-stocked with all the batch files and automated certificate generation routines I could ever want.
I got the app working fine in the Android simulator on my desktop, but I couldn’t manage to get it over to my phone… Very frustrating. But still, I put in about 6 hours of work this day, and I’m starting to get really stoked.
The first thing I did on Tuesday morning was fix my deliver-to-phone problems. Turns out it was really stupidly simple: the USB port at the front of my computer wouldn’t maintain a debug connection to my drivers. Everything else worked fine, but moving it to the back panel solved all my problems. Sometimes computers are really really frustrating!!
I was avoiding implementing a touch-friendly draw-to-spell interface (it just felt like grunt work!) but I managed to pull it off with just an hour of work. I patched all the memory leaks, converted all my graphics to cached bitmaps, switched my phone to GPU-rendering, and generally worked on mobile optimizations. For my first stab at doing all of this, it was much, much easier than I expected.
In the evening I implemented some visual pizazz – particle effects, simulated gravity for falling blocks (instead of prototype-instant-teleportation), and other things that just give the game a bit more “crunch.” It was around this time I started looking for a proper artist to dress the game up for me.
I topped the night off by updating the dictionary words to the official, tournament Scrabble word list (the tournament version includes naughty words, unlike the home version).
In total, the day was probably 7 or 8 hours of work, and the Android app was running really nicely on my older Nexus One. My thinking was, if I can get the game performing really well on that old equipment – I wouldn’t have to worry about further optimizing for newer equipment.
After not getting enough sleep, I spent Wednesday morning trying to cut down on the CPU overhead. One of my best optimizations was rewriting the dictionary search routine – now implementing a Binary Search Algorithm. I also implemented “live spellcheck” (it detects proper words while you are spelling, instead of waiting to search after you’re done), which changed the game a surprising amount.
More mobile optimizations in the afternoon – in this case, the simple act of deliberately manipulating the frame rate to very low numbers when there’s no action. Other than saving CPU time, this also has the benefit of not bleeding your mobile battery dry. No reason to render the motionless Main Menu at 60 FPS!
In the evening, I finally bit the bullet: I signed up for the $99 Apple Developer account, installed iTunes, and created some certificates. With only 2 hours of work, I had my first-ever iPad app running on my device!
Of course, transitioning my app from the smaller-screened Nexus One to the larger-screened iPad2 unveiled a bunch of scaling errors I made in my code. I spent the bulk of the evening fixing up all of my dynamic-screen-size handling classes and trying to make things pretty.
And that brings us up to date. It’s Wednesday night as I write this! I’ve put in about 6 hours of work today and the game could be launched in the app-store right now, if I wanted to shoot myself in the foot marketing-wise.
Now that I’ve got the last few days out of the way, I’ll try to update my blog once-per-day with more details on what’s going on.
I think it’s really exciting that I was able to take my AS3 coding skills and a free IDE (FlashDevelop) – and use them to generate a market-worthy Android and iOS application in just 4 days of part-time work.
by Renegade on January 26, 2012 04:23 AM
As tweeted by Ian Marsh of NimbleBit, here is the Tiny Tower dev’s response to Zynga’s new game about building towers. It probably makes the point without much more explanation from us.
by Renegade on January 26, 2012 12:20 AM
Ever wanted to be part of an official world record attempt? MuchDifferent needs 1,000 players to play its Unity powered FPS game this Sunday, as it tries to set a record for the most players simultaneously involved in one (realtime) battle.
The battle is intended to be between game developer and game player, so choose your side depending which of the two you are. We’re not convinced it will be quite as orderly as the promo screenshots suggest, but it should be an epic battle however it plays out.
The record attempt is part of a bigger push for publicity around their new server architecture, which was designed to cope with games on a massive scale. With most FPS games supporting 64 simultaneous players at most, a server structure capable of handing two teams of 500 players each would potentially change multiplayer gaming.
More info on MuchDifferent’s website here.
by Daniel on January 26, 2012 12:07 AM
by Andy Moore on January 25, 2012 08:33 PM
Global Game Jam is coming up, and that reminded me: I still haven’t talked about my last jam game! I made a video here (the first 3 minutes is talking about game jams in general, the rest is about the game):
So the last half of the video there, I start summarizing the new things I’ve learned with Project Corona. Here’s a list:
Anyway, if you want to check it out, here’s a link to the last build I made. It’s meant to run 800×600 or so, so if your browser window is huge you might have to resize to get the right performance out of it.
Some tips while playing:
I’ve pretty much abandoned the project at this point, but I still go and play it once and a while. Let me know what you think!
by Renegade on January 25, 2012 08:08 PM
The long awaited Super Crazy Guitar Maniac Deluxe 4 launches on notDoppler tomorrow at around 8am GMT (that’s midnight on the West Coast), and we’re pretty confident in saying it will be one of the top games of the month.
The previous installment in the series (Super Crazy Guitar Maniac Deluxe 3) received millions of plays around the internet, including over 5 million on Kongregate alone, and SCGMD4 looks to be a much more polished game.
The distribution version of the game will be released around major portals on February 2nd, so if you’re holding out for Kong badges or Newgrounds medals before you play the game, you only have one extra week to wait.
The Super Crazy Guitar Maniac Deluxe devs note that they’ve included a new easter egg on their website that can only be found from within the game. There’s also a trailer for the game here which includes no gameplay at all.
by noreply@blogger.com (Kingmush) on January 25, 2012 07:00 PM
by Rich on January 25, 2012 05:44 PM
by Tricky on January 25, 2012 05:00 PM
by White Wolf on January 25, 2012 02:30 PM
Continue Reading about CoolBuddy – Amber Escape
by alexandra on January 25, 2012 02:00 PM
by White Wolf on January 25, 2012 12:54 PM
Continue Reading about Games Novel – Modern Classic Room Escape
by noreply@blogger.com (Kingmush) on January 25, 2012 12:00 PM
by Joe Willmott (noreply@blogger.com) on January 25, 2012 11:18 AM
by White Wolf on January 25, 2012 10:00 AM
Continue Reading about Together Alone
by White Wolf on January 25, 2012 07:57 AM
Continue Reading about The Hunting Of The Snark
by grinnyp on January 25, 2012 06:45 AM
by Vlad on January 25, 2012 12:15 AM
Hi everyone, Vlad here.
Let me start by saying that the title is a bit misleading. For starters it is not an actual bout but more a decision making process. It also gives the impression I’ll write more about this or that I have some kind of plan about this subject. I don’t, it just happens that I think I’ll travel this road again.
The game design for this game states that:
1. The player’s objective is to reach the top of the “structure” (named just to make sense) where the action rolls;
2. The “structure” has several “floors” (again just for easier comprehension);
3. The player can fall to the previous “floor”;
4. It is guaranteed that the player will see at least three “floors”;
One thing that I know for sure is that we will be blitting all graphics and that the player token has three different blit objects and two of those rotate thus negating copyPixels and putting the dreadful draw method to work.
Another thing I know is that each “floor” is a tilemap, also blitted and that each tile is 64×64.
And now the assumptions begin. How big is each “floor”? I have no idea but let’s say that a rather large “floor” has 50×50 tiles. If the player will see at least three floors and on later stages all “floors” are rather large we are talking about 7,500 tiles to be rendered with a astonishing number of 30,720,000 pixels to be copied… each frame.
The “floor” where the player is will only render the tiles on screen (88 max) but the other two lower “floors” can potentially be fully rendered given the camera specs. Even if all three “floors” only rendered tiles on screen (which won’t happen by design) there would still be 7,500 objects to manage and that’s tiles only since we need to add to this all the remaining entities: player, enemies, decorations, effects, etc, but to make it worse the bottom two levels will be zoomed and probably in full view which means not only that all their blit objects will be visible but also that at least 5,000 of those objects will use draw instead of copyPixels… Did the headache kicked in already or is it just pure performance insanity?
One of the great things about copyPixels is that it only renders the intersection between the target bitmapData rectangle and the source rectangle positioned at the destination point. What this means is that if we have 1,000 objects to render but only one actually has an intersecting rectangle, most of the processing time is running the array, vector or list and – more important and processor heavy – calling the functions that will in the end render.
The draw method also does this with a matrix… more on this later.
The solution was to write a BlitTileMap class that builds the tilemap in one big texture before it is used. While it uses much more RAM this class allows to address pretty much every problem stated earlier.
First and foremost the number of objects managed and therefor the performance lost with running their container (in our case, a linked list) and calling functions. From a potential 7,500+ we now have 3. The other issue that this addresses is the number of pixels it will render or try to render, from potentially 30,000,000+ to the worst case scenario of 1,050,000. And last but not least, considering the lower “floors” will be zoomed out, instead of using draw to render 5,000+ objects it will render… 2!
But the draw method also has a funny and helpful consequence. The smaller the scale, the faster draw executes which in terms of performance is relevant considering the zoom out will be achieved through scale. Less objects taking less time to render will be (I hope) quite a performance boost.
Did I just write all this? Wow!… Later!
by Justin on January 24, 2012 11:24 PM
War has raged on for centuries between bees and bears. Bears always come for more honey and the bees can do nothing but sting them softly and hope that they go away. Not this time! This time the bees are taking over and ensuring that the bee civilization, not bears, will dominate the land. Will you be up to the challenge? Let’s find out!
by Renegade on January 24, 2012 10:37 PM
In a strong statement about the power of HTML5 for gaming, Aditya Ravi Shanker has ported the original Command & Conquer game to browsers.
When Command and Conquer was first released in 1995, it was unthinkable that it would ever be able to run in a browser, nevermind being powered by HTML.
It’s not the complete game, granted. But work is ongoing and the progress already made on the project is stunning.
You can try the demo for yourself here.
by Eric on January 24, 2012 10:16 PM
Continue Reading about TimeFall – Curved Seashells
by Renegade on January 24, 2012 09:01 PM
This was probably the inevitable next step for a company that’s mastered the art of turning casual gamers into high spending gaming addicts, but Zygna appears to be readying a move into real-money gambling. A spokesman said negotiations were underway with several potential partners for the move.
After a difficult public launch, followed by suggestions that the social games market had plateaued out, expansion into another market sector is the obvious way to go for the company. Zygna Poker is already the internet’s most played poker game, and its clear that turning even a fraction of its 30 million monthly users into paying customers would significantly increase profit for the company.
Any move into gambling is sure to spark further ethical debate around the company’s policies, following previous concerns over their attitude to IP infringement, player addiction, and Facebook wall spam.