No, you didn’t misread the title. Yes, creator of popular social games like Zynga Poker, Farmville, and Mafia Wars is really planning to blow up an armored truck as part of their promotion for the new expansion, Mafia Wars Las Vegas. When it comes to marketing and grabbing peoples imaginations, Zynga is way ahead of the social gaming developer crowd with their ideas and tactics.

They plan to air the event on the internet live once Mafia Wars Las Vegas reaches ten million visitors to the page. They’re also giving out a ton of free stuff like iPads a week and $25,000 in cash (thats real money, not facebook poker chips incase you’re wondering).

The counter for the event currently stands around 4 million as of today. There’s no doubt Zynga will eventually get 10 million players to the site, so for  those of you hoping to watch an actual armor car get lit up like a firecracker, it’s only a matter of time..

Disney acquires Playdom for $560 million

In the largest social gaming deal since Electronic Arts bought Playfish, this week entertainment goliath Disney purchased Playdom, the creator of games such as Mobsters, Facebook Poker Palace, Tiki Farm, and Sorority Life for social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace.

Does this mean Mickey Mouse will be coming out with his own brand of Facebook Poker Chips anytime soon? Playdom’s Poker Palace game was never able to reach the same level of popular as that of the #1 Texas Holdem Game on Facebook, Zynga Poker, but hat doesn’t mean that they can’t mount another try at marketing a decent facebook poker game with their new financial backers. Having a sponsor like Disney in a social game maker’s corner opens all types of marketing and advertising opportunities to a game maker that they would have previously had to pay millions for.

Selling zynga poker chips to online texas holdem gamers has been a hugely profitable enterprice for Zynga so far so it only stands to reason that Playdom might make another attempt to promote Poker Palace. While the popularity of other games like farmville has risen and fallen over the past year, facebook texas holdem poker games seem to be the one theme that doesn’t seem to fade. One thing is for sure, online gamers sure love their poker games.

Facebook Poker Chips

Zynga Poker Chips

TechCrunch has reported that Google is in talks with Zynga Texas Holdem Poker and Farmville developer Zynga Games to launch a new social gaming portal called “Google Games” where gamers will be able to play games the latest Zynga games. Google has allegedly invested anywhere from $100 to $200 million dollars into the social gaming leader all the while keeping the topic quiet.

You’ll be hard pressed to find any details on this new gaming portal by Google as for the time being it seems to be under lock and key and nobody from Google isn’t really talking too much about it publicly. You might be asking yourself what Google’s strategy is by releasing another gaming portal with Zynga games when players can already play games like Facebook Poker, Mafia Wars, Farmville, and the new Frontierville on Facebook and Myspace?

Perhaps Google, in their bid to own a piece of just about everything on the globe, is trying to break into the very lucrative social gaming transactions market like Facebook has done with facebook credits.

Does this mean that players will be buying their facebook poker chips and zynga poker chips with google credits one day soon? It’s too early to say, and Google certainly isn’t volunteering any information about their intentions or plans, so for now gamers and game makers can only use their imaginations.

“Being rich is having money; being wealthy is having time to spend that money on anything you want”

Insidesocialgames.com recently reported on the phenomenon of social gaming “whales”, or rather players who spend over $1000 buying virtual items like farmville cash and facebook poker chips in online games. Much like the well known “whales” of Las Vegas casinos who routinely drop millions of dollars in a single night at the tables, these whales have become a significant source of profit and revenue for social gaming companies such as Zynga Games, Playdom, and Playfish, often spending $1000 or more to buy their in game items.

Spending $1000 is one thing and spending $25,540 on virtual items like facebook poker chips is in another league though. Below you can see the top spenders reported by the payments platform company Social Gold. Suprisingly their biggest spender isn’t some crazed online gamer from the US, but rather someone from Saudi Arabia. If this guy is spending $25,000 on facebook poker chips and farmville, imagine what his weekly entertainment budget must be..

Are facebook poker chips intellectual property?

Notoriously sue happy social gaming company Zynga last week filed a lawsuit in United States District of California court this past week, one of a long line of copyright disputes brought by the company against online sellers of facebook poker chips in their popular online game Zynga Texas Holdem Poker.

The Complaint alleges copyright and trademark infringement, state unfair competition claims and intentional interference with contractual relations.  Lots of interesting statements about “virtual property” and “virtual currency,” but at this point, the majority of this Complaint alleges standard copyright & trademark infringement.

Third party virtual items sales have long been a gray area when it comes to the legal precedents governing the copyrights and intellectual property appliations of in game items, mostly because there simply aren’t many precedents to govern virtual items. It would seem facebook poker chips in online texas holdem poker games are now falling into this category.

Gaming company Blizzard’s famous legal battles with in game World of Warcraft gold sellers has been ongoing for many years, though they have mainly focused on creators of game playing bots, chat spammers, and distributers of programs that give players an unfair edge. Oddly enough Blizzard has stayed away from actually going after individual sellers of Wow Gold. Zyng’a claim against PlayerAuctions.com isn’t just over facebook poker chips (or zynga poker chips as they’re known) either, as they also provide Mafia Wars based items/services on their website.

]]> http://www.facebookpokerchipnews.com/are-facebook-poker-chips-intellectual-property/feed/ 0 http://www.facebookpokerchipnews.com/digital-drugs-how-facebook-poker-chips-and-other-virtual-currencies-are-transforming-addictions/ http://www.facebookpokerchipnews.com/digital-drugs-how-facebook-poker-chips-and-other-virtual-currencies-are-transforming-addictions/#comments Sun, 14 Mar 2010 23:51:59 +0000 admin http://www.facebookpokerchipnews.com/?p=335  

However, in place of cocaine are crack, these dealers are distributing Facebook poker chips, Farmville coins, and Mafia Wars or World of Warcraft Gold and other coveted virtual goods and currencies to their loyal buyers. Instead of an artificial drug induced high, players are rewarded with surges in endorphins and neurotransmitters.

Will Wright, legendary game developer of mega hit titles such as The Sims and Spore, delivered a keynote speech at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this week. He likened the relationship between game developers and gamers to that of drug dealers and their users.

Full Article: http://gdc.gamespot.com/story/6253594/will-wright-game-design-a-lot-like-dealing-drugs

While other games rise, peak and fall, one game braves through the storm of social gaming fickleness: Facebook Texas Holdem Poker. People love their facebook poker chips in Zynga, Playfish, and Playdom poker games and AOL and Games.com have finally taken notice and decided to introduce their own facebook poker application for texas holdem fans. 

While there have been many imitators of Zynga Texas Holdem Poker over the years there has yet to be a true competitor that has been able to dethrone them completely, instead having to make due with stealing a few thousands facebook poker players here and there for their applications.

So will Games.com and AOL’s version be any different or will it just fall by the wayside like so many others who have come and gone with their own version of facebook poker chips? I guess there’s only one way to find out: play the game.

You can give it a test run here: Games.com Facebook Poker

Yahoo brings Facebook poker chips to its users

Yahoo announced this week that it will be bringing games like Facebook Texas Holdem Poker to it’s suite of gaming sites through a partnership with Zynga Game Network, giving it’s users a broader selection of games to choose from and access to new ways to interact with friends and family while tending to their farms in Farmville or playing with their facebook poker chips.

Benefits of the new partnership will include:

• Ability for people to play Zynga games and access their personal Zynga game updates across Yahoo!’s properties including the Homepage, Yahoo! Games, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger and others.

• Sharing of updates across multiple social experiences simultaneously while playing their favorite Zynga games on Yahoo!

• Product integration of Zynga games with the Yahoo! Application Platform (YAP), Yahoo!’s OpenSocial container through which third-party developers can develop applications on Yahoo!

“With over 35 million unique users playing our games every single day, social games are fast becoming a leading source of entertainment worldwide surpassing most television shows,” said Mark Pincus, founder and CEO of Zynga. “Our partnership with Yahoo! gives millions of new users the ability to connect with friends and families through games.”

Could Zynga and Facebook be parting ways?

Three years ago it seemed a match made in heaven. Facebook had tens of millions of users and Zynga had the games like Facebook Texas Holdem Poker and Mafia Wars to keep them coming back and continually draw in new users. Fast forward to today and the symbiotic relationship between the two internet pioneers is a drastically changed one.

A few months back Facebook announced that they were rolling out their own Facebook credits system, which would allow players in games to to purchase virtual items with a single universal currency rather than dealing with the payment gateways of each individual game.  Regardless of whether a player wanted to buy facebook poker chips or yoville coins, they could simply use the facebook credits in their account to do both, eliminating redundant fees to payment processors like Paypal.

So how could reducing transaction fees and creating a universal virtual currency be bad for Zynga? Well, for their efforts Facebook is asking a hefty 30% commission for their system of  credits. Considering that Zynga’s revenue for 2010 is estimated to be around $400 million dollars, that means Facebook will be getting a $120 million cut in what pretty much amounts to a gigantic “mafia protection fee” for Facebook. This is in addition to the tens of millions that Zynga already pays to facebook in ad fees.

On the other hand, gamers won’t just be limited to buying facebook poker chips or farmville cash from Zynga with the new credits. As the number of developers in the social gaming niche continues to grow at a viral pace, this new credit system will allow players to buy virtual items in just about any game they desire, whether from Zynga, Playfish, Playdom or any other developer.  A universal virtual currency would be similar to what the Euro did in 2000 with the elimination of individual countries’ currencies in exchange for one single currency, only this credit system would not be limited by any geographical boundries.

According to Techcrunch, Zynga CEO Mark Pincus announced to employees during a meeting:

that Zynga was going to launch a social game network called Zynga Live. The Zynga Live initiative was a social gaming network. Facebook and Zynga has been negotiating on Facebook Credits and the talks turned for the worst. In the negotiation process, Facebook shut off Zynga’s feeds and threatened to shut down games. Zynga in the process threatened to completely leave Facebook and prepared to do so in the previous upcoming weeks.

It would seem that the two companies that once sent each other cupcakes celebrating their mutual success are now at odds with each other about which one has more of a command over their user’s time and attention and just how much this command should be worth. Would Zynga really consider leaving Facebook to avoid giving up a 30% cut in transactions for facebook poker chips and farmville items or is all this drama just a negotiation tactic to scare facebook?

It’s unlikely that we will see a complete split of the two companies in the immediate future, but Zynga has already started to hedge their bets by allowing gamers to play farmville on Farmville.com in addition to logging in via their regular Facebook accounts. They’ve also been gathering email addresses of players in games such as Facebook Texas Holdem Poker and Treasure Island, perhaps in order to communicate better with their users in the event that they decide to one day break away from Facebook. At the very least, it will be interesting to watch how the two old friends sort out this issue over the course of the next few months.

Social gaming developer and creator of popular games like Zynga Poker and Farmville on Facebook announced that they were partnering with InComm to provide a line of prepaid virtual currency cards for some of their top games. These cards will be available at locations like 7-11, Best Buy, GameStop, and Target locations around the U.S. Players can purchase these cards for buying in game items in Zynga’s Farmville, Mafia Wars, and Yoville applications, but what about facebook poker chips?

It’s not clear yet why Zynga left out  their most popular Facebook Poker games from the offering, but surely players would be willing to spend money on gift cards to buy facebook poker chips too, in addition to fuel for tractors in Farmville.