August 21, 2012

Big Fish goes into real money gambling

Seattle based casual games company, Big Fish Games is going real money, Big Fish says it will offer players in the U.K. the ability to make real bets through their upcoming version of its Big Fish Casino iPhone app.

Sadly for USA players this won’t be available, until the gambling laws change there. But American regulators are moving toward a legal and regulated online gambling system, and setting up a virtual casino now gives Big Fish a new stream of cash while it waits for the U.S. landscape to sort itself out.

Big Fish’s casino app is the result of a purchase the 10-year-old company made last year, buying Oakland, CA’s Self Aware Games. That small company made a virtual gambling game called Card Ace: Casino, which was a Top 10 iPhone app.

Big Fish founder and CEO Paul Thelen said earleir in the year that the Self Aware acquisition made sense even without legal online gambling in the U.S. “What we bought was a stock,” he said. “The call option on that stock is if gambling is legalized in more areas of the country.”

But there’s been some changes to the landscape—specifically, the emergence of Betable, a London-based company that is licensed to provide online gambling in the U.K. Betable, which also has an office in San Francisco, is offering casual game developers the ability to rake in money from legal online gambling across the pond by plugging their game into its system.

Betable CEO Christopher Griffin told a crowd at the Casual Connect conference in Seattle how it all works. Betable handles all of the security, transactions, identity verification, and legal liability—for an undisclosed share of the revenue. Game publishers simply plug their creation into the Betable system and draw the users.

That separation allows U.S. game developers to legally collect money from online gamblers in the U.K., because Betable is the actual entity doing all of the nitty-gritty work of processing the gambling transactions.

In his pitch to game developers, Griffin cited in-house research that showed average monthly revenue per user for a typical casual game was $1. Adding gambling to the picture puts that figure at $100 or more a month, he says.

Big Fish’s entry into the world of online gambling is a huge signal about where the industry is going. Pretty soon, it might not be unusual for your average casual or mobile game developer to have a casino-type product that makes a bunch of money, underwriting any other games they want to produce. Or, as Griffin said, versions of existing games that incorporate gambling into the regular gameplay, rather than just pumping out digital slot machines and blackjack tables.

By jumping into the fray now, Big Fish is also getting ahead of other big names in the casual games business. High on that list is San Francisco-based Zynga, that announced last month that it was getting into online gambling in the first half of 2013.

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