Like every competitive shooter, Battlefield 3 has a problem with hackers and cheats who use exploits and aimbots to boost their stats. Recently the problem seems to have become more serious. The unofficial BF3 blog mentions an instance in which one of DICE’s own moderators was uncovered as a hacker. Now a group of hackers are advertising an exploit that allows them to get innocent players banned.

The author of this Reddit post got in touch yesterday with links to hacker forum discussions revealing exploits that would trick Punkbuster into ejecting honest players. A number of threads on the Battlelog forums have been started by players claiming to have been banned from Battlefield 3 games without cause. There are plenty of reports of servers and leaderboards dominated by bots racking up hundreds of kills.

DICE have recently said that they’re ramping up anti-cheat measures and have been issuing bans en-masse to cheaters they’ve been catching, but among Battlefield 3 players there’s increasing scepticism over the levels of security offered by anti-cheat program, Punkbuster.

Battlefield 3 community manager crash7800 responded to the Reddit post saying “we’re absolutely looking into this issue.” They’re currently looking into the hackers’ claims to establish how much of what they say is true. “We definitely know that something isn’t right and we’re working to fix it ASAP.” DICE’s most recent Battlelog post recognises that some players have been having problems dropping from Punkbuster servers. Their advice to affected players is to “join servers that are not running PunkBuster.”

If you encounter a cheater in Battlefield 3, DICE recommend reporting them through Battlelog. To do this, you can “enter the profile page of the person you suspect and click the triangle in the top right corner of his name.” This will lead to a report screen where the devs encourage players to “enter as much detail as possible, describing what specifically makes you believe this player has used unfair methods, and preferably include a link to the Battle Report for the match in question.”

We’ve contacted DICE for comment on the hackers’ claims and more detail on ther their plans to counter cheaters. It’s not just hackers that Battlefield 3 fans have to contend with. Many players, including ourselves, have constant difficulty getting into games. Once in, disconnections are a regular annoyance. I wrote about why Battlefield 3 deserved our Online Game of the Year award. I still think the game underneath the connection problems and cheating scandals is world class, but with so many problems three months after release, player patience will understandably be wearing thin.

[Source:PCGamer]

So, we’ve heard from a source that the next Xbox may feature some kind of anti-used games technology. When you first read that, your first instinct was probably to think it’s either bullshit or the worst idea a video game company has ever had.

It is, I believe, neither.

In fact, if it ends up being correct, it makes total sense. Why? Over the past year we’ve seen developers, publishers and then even platform holders like Sony embrace the idea of the “online pass”, a concept designed to either prevent game trade-ins or get more money out of those skipping new purchases.

It’s a movement that, as time goes on, will only pick up steam. And now that nearly all major publishers are on-board with the idea in one form or another, the next logical step is to embed the practice in gaming hardware.

Remember, our source didn’t tell us the machine would permanently and irrevocably bar the playing of second-hand games. Just that there’d be measures in place to prevent it. No company would lock a machine from ever letting you borrow a game, or ever trade one in. There’d be too much resistance from consumers for the former and from both consumers and retailers for the latter.

But restrictive measures implemented on the hardware side of things would eliminate the need for publishers and developers to come up with their own cumbersome and inconsistent “online pass” systems, such as we’re stuck with today. It could suddenly be universal, part of the console itself, tied to user accounts or disc serials or something. If such measures were in place, everygame could require an unlock code or online pass to be played if bought second-hand. Or even borrowed. Which would suck, but then, I’m not saying I like this idea. Just that this is where I see it headed.

It would satisfy publishers, who would be seeing massive incentives given for people to buy games new. It would also, I guess, satisfy pre-owned retailers like GameStop, who if able to sell “online passes” for these games would at least retain the option of trading old games in for new ones.

Know that, well, this is not what we know. All we know is what Stephen posted earlier, when he wrote there’d be “some sort of anti-used game system as part of [Microsoft's] so-called Xbox 720″. This is just me taking current industry trends, this rumour and building outwards.

But I think it’s entirely feasible. What do you think?

[Source:Kotaku]

Nintendo will bring Wii U to major markets, including Europe and the US, in time for Christmas this year, president Satoru Iwata has said in Japan this morning.

Speaking at an investor meeting following the release of its Q3 financials today, Iwata said (viaReuters) that Wii U will launch within the holiday period in EU, US, Japan and Australia.

A 2012 launch was confirmed Wii U’s debut at E3 last year, and was narrowed down for release between E3 and December at the end of last year. This is the first time Nintendo has been specific on release timing and regions since the console’s announcement in Los Angeles last summer.

Nintendo has said it will re-reveal Wii U at this year’s E3. That will take place between June 5-7. The console was shown to press at CES in Vegas this month, an event which included the debut of a new panoramic demo of a Tokyo street.

On the first-party front, not much is known to be in development for the system besides Super Smash Bros. A Zelda HD demo was also shown at E3 last year, as was a New Super Mario Bros-like experience.

For third-parties, EA, THQ, Ubisoft and Warner are some of the studios who have committed to Wii U, with local versions of Darksiders II, Metro: Last Light, Batman: Arkham City, Assassin’s Creed and Ghost Recon planned for the system.

It was rumoured by Develop yesterday that Wii U will have twice the power of Xbox 360, but it’s said to be underpowered compared to developer expectations.

[Source:VG24/7]

This Sunday Much Different will attempt to break world records by hosting a 1000 player FPS battle. You can help. The game is called Man vs. Machine, a free, browser-based shooter built in the Unity engine. If you’re camped on the Man vs. Machine front page when the record attempt starts, you stand a chance of being one of those soldiers.

It all kicks off this Sunday, January 29 at 4pm CET / 3PM GMT/ 7am PST. Don’t expect Planetside levels of complexity from this one. It’s a straightforward shooter backed up by some fancy server architecture which should hopefully allow two teams of 500 players to fight each other to the death. The event’s being run by Much Different, who are doing it “because we could.”

The teams are split between gamers and developers. Gamers will become Man, described as being “strong, handsome and red” with splash damage rocket launchers. Developers will be Machines, who are “cold, big and blue” and wield precision lasers. Slots will be allocated on a first come, first served basis but you can buy a ticket to guarantee yourself a spot. Find out more on the Man vs. Machine site.

[Source:PCGamer]

Per the nearly standard operating procedure of “beta testing” wide-scale free to play titles, Canadians and “Canadians” can now get their hands on Zynga’s latest iOS game, Dream Heights [Free]. It doesn’t take more than a few quick glances at the screenshots and iTunes text to realize that Zynga has firmly focused their copy machines on NimbleBit’s Tiny Tower [Free]. It’s really incredibly just how blatant of a clone this is, as Zynga has gone far beyond just copying the premise of the game- They even directly lifted the restocking mechanics, elevator upgrades, UI elements, and more.

NimbleBit’s Ian Marsh has taken to twitter with an image that perfectly exhibits just how shamelessly Zynga’s “inspiration” is for this new free to play title of theirs with side by side screenshots and a hefty amount of trademarked NimbleBit snark.

It’ll be interesting to see how this all shakes out. Historically speaking, Apple has had a very hands-off approach to even the most blatant of clones on the App Store. But, we are talking their very own game of the year last year that’s being mercilessly knocked-off here, by Zynga of all companies. I doubt much if anything will actually happen, but I’m not sure how Zynga couldn’t stir up a hefty helping of bad blood amongst anyone who realizes that such a large company is lifting ideas straight from a three (3) man development studio.

We’ll have to see how Dream Heights does once it eventually sees its worldwide release. The amusing (and sad, to be honest) part of all this is that per another tweet, Zynga once attempted to acquire NimbleBit. If you can’t buy ‘em, clone ‘em?

[Source:TouchArcade]

In this exclusive excerpt from the forthcoming debut issue of Distance quarterly, we learn about how too many video games treat players like rats in a Skinner Box, lulling them into easy stimulation but requiring little creativity.

In the 1890s, while studying natural sciences at the University of Saint Petersburg, a Russian mathematician named Ivan Pavlov was analyzing dogs’ saliva output over time. Pavlov noticed that dogs tended to salivate more before eating and that merely the sight of a white lab coat would induce salivation — even if no food was on the way. So he tried ringing a bell before presenting them with food, and found that over time, the dogs would salivate even if a bell was rung with no food presented. Pavlov’s research defined classical conditioning, in which a primary reinforcer (one which naturally elicits a response, e.g. food or pain) is associated with a conditioned or secondary reinforcer, such as the lab coat or bell.

Forty years later, Burrhus Frederic Skinner built upon Pavlov’s observations as a young psychologist in graduate school. He constructed a soundproof, lightproof chamber that housed a small animal; a lever was placed within the animal’s reach, which triggered a primary reinforcer. Called the Skinner box, the device opened up many possibilities for experimentation, leading to breakthroughs in later research: from the relative addictiveness of cocaine in isolation versus in a larger community, to the question of whether rats have empathy.

Skinner is now credited as the father of operant conditioning: a form of learning where a subject is conditioned to respond to a secondary reinforcer through association with some form of primary reinforcement. Not only did Skinner’s work show that associations between primary and secondary reinforcers appear in nature, it also demonstrated that new reinforcers can be manufactured.

Skinner and Pavlov proved that primary reinforcers are extremely powerful motivators. After sex and sleep, bacon is one of nature’s most powerful primary reinforcers, partly due to its high fat and protein content in comparison to other meats. Bacon has become known as the “gateway meat”: the smell triggers intense cravings, even in vegetarians. But in our modern world, our instinctual craving for bacon and other fatty foods can cause significant health problems.

The box also taught us two fundamental lessons, one of which had ramifications that extended far beyond Skinner’s experiments. Humans are hardwired to respond to primary reinforcers, just like any other animals. And while primary reinforcers have a diminishing effect once we’re satiated, secondary reinforcers, like money or social status, exist outside our biological needs, and these never hit a satiation point. In other words, we are hardwired to seek approval from our peers, and we can never get enough of it.

Many people defend FarmVille as a harmless distraction, arguing that the thousands of hours spent playing the game would still have been wasted on other activities. But there’s no question that the social game market, with its virtual currencies and unlimited stock of goods, is a huge cash cow. And it’s also clear, when you look more closely at FarmVille, that it was engineered with one goal in mind: to coerce users into tending their virtual plots of land for as long as possible. Using our natural tendency to reciprocate gratitude from our peers, we end up pestering our friends to keep returning. And cleverly-timed crop cycles force players to return to their farms at all times of day. But what about the techniques employed in other games?

Black, White, and 254 Shades of Gray

Moral relativism aside, I think “bad” games exist — provided we define “bad” in unambiguous terms. In Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Immanuel Kant tried to specifically define this with the Categorical Imperative: a set of rules that could gauge an action’s morality. But regardless of how we choose to evaluate a game’s morality, there are certain traits which can push it closer to the “evil” side of the spectrum.

The primary characteristic of unethical games is that they are manipulative, misleading, or both. From a user-experience standpoint, these games display dark patterns, which I define as common design decisions that trick users into doing something against their will. Dark patterns are usually employed to maximize some metric of success, such as email signups, checkouts, or upgrades; they generally test well when they’re released to users.

For example, FarmVille, Tap Fish, and Club Penguin play on deep-rooted psychological impulses to make money from their audiences. They take advantage of gamers’ completion urge by prominently displaying progress bars that encourage leveling up. They randomly time rewards, much like slot machines time payouts to keep players coming back, even when their net gain is negative. And they spread virally by compelling players to constantly post requests to their friends’ walls.

This trend is not just limited to social games, though: many combat games, like America’s Army, are funded by the U.S. military and serve as thinly-veiled recruitment tools. Some brands have launched Facebook games like Cheez-It’s Swap-It!, and they serve as tools to sell more products. These techniques can be used in any sort of game, in any context.

Of course, not all games fall neatly into a clear division between good and evil. “Good” games can ask little in the way of critical thinking and problem solving, but still be fulfilling. Tetris is a complex, enriching game that is just as addictive today as when it debuted in 1988; and yet many would argue that it lacks the problem solving challenges or rich plots that make adventure games like Sword & Sworcery and The Legend of Zelda so compelling. Different people find meaning and fulfillment in different aspects of gameplay; that’s what makes gaming so fun for players and game designers.

Hard Fun

One of the best-selling independent iOS games is a side-scrolling jumper called Canabalt. It consists of a tiny man running over the rooftops of a dystopian cityscape. Players tap to jump, and the gameplay speeds up over time. There is no end to Canabalt, only longer runs: the longest run yet recorded, at 8 minutes and 16 seconds, takes the player through more than 22 kilometers of crumbling buildings, falling obstacles, and inconveniently placed windows.

At IndieCade in October 2011, Adam Saltsman, Canabalt’s creator, discussed the notion of “time until death.” All of us have a finite amount of time on earth, and any time we spend on a particular activity is time that we can’t spend doing something else. This means that the time we spend gaming represents most of a game’s cost of ownership, far more than any money that we spend. If that time is enjoyable (or rather, if its benefits outweigh its costs), then the game was worth our time.

Value is created in different ways for different people, but the most immediate is through generating engagement until players achieve mastery. In a panel held at Seattle’s Casual Connect in 2011, game designer and consultant Nicole Lazzarodescribed two types of fun: easy fun and hard fun. Games that don’t challenge players beyond a certain point — “easy fun” — will never allow them to achieve mastery, which could deprive them of a highly rewarding part of playing.

The panel also included Demetri Detsaridis, the general manager of Zynga’s New York office. Zynga has its own ideas of what constitutes the “real fun” in FarmVille and similar games, which align neatly with the company’s business interests. His answer of how they approach “easy” vs. “hard” fun was telling:

You know, while we don’t necessarily have this framework in particular in mind… you know, while I was looking at this chart yesterday, while we were talking, I was thinking “Well, Zynga does a lot, if not most, of its development work in this kind of infinity symbol loop here between ‘people’ fun and ‘easy’ fun… there’s sort of an overlap here that isn’t maybe entirely clear on the chart, but a lot of… I think a lot of social games kind of are really quite close to the top, you know three-quarters of this, that the ‘people’ fun and the ‘easy’ fun are really sort of mushed together, and that where you see the hard fun coming in is in perhaps surprising places, like thinking about your social graph and how you, in real life, are managing that – well, am I sending, you know, friend requests to these, these people? Is that – you know, so that’s actually part of the game, and designers know that, so that sort of is an interesting almost meta-game layer of almost ‘hard’ fun on top of what otherwise might seem in this structure to be really people- and easy-centric.

Detsardis nodded in approval as Rob Tercek, the panel’s moderator, summed it up:

The games themselves aren’t where the action happens; the strategy component is: when do you reach out into your social graph? When are you going to spam that list? How frequently are you gonna do that?

I’ll reiterate this in plainer language, just in case the quote wasn’t clear: Detsaridis said that one of the most compelling parts of playing Zynga’s games is deciding when and how to spam your friends with reminders to play Zynga’s games.

Creating hard fun isn’t an easy task. It requires thinking deeply about the gamer’s experience, not just using cheap tricks to drive engagement. FarmVille, Tap Fish, and Club Penguin all employ Skinner-like techniques to persuade people to spend more time and money. But there are plenty of honest ways to create real engagement, and it’s our responsibility as creators and consumers of games to demand more honest and fulfilling fun from our entertainment.

[Source:TheAtlantic]

“I’m 12 and what is this”. If you don’t know what that means, here. Everybody back on the same page? OK, so we can all have a laugh at this poor guy’s expense when he was banned from Star Wars: Old Republic for using the line.

Posting “I’m 12 and what is this” in a forum thread, the user was “permanently suspended” from the game for violating its terms of service, specifically – and deliciously – the fact you have to be aged 13 and over to have an account.

What I find almost as funny is the name of the punishment handed out. A “Permanent suspension”. There’s, uh, no such thing. If it’s permanent, it’s not a suspension!

 

BioWare is clueless, banned a user based on a meme [Destructoid]

[Source:Kotaku]

PS Vita (and Sony Walkman) designer Takashi Sogabe has told CVG that he’d like to make future PS Vita iterations thinner than the launch model.

Speaking in a round-table interview at Sony Computer Entertainment’s Japanese HQ last month, Sogabe, who runs the Corporate Design Centre, also said he’d wanted to use metal rather than plastic materials when developing the system.

“Speaking not only about the PS Vita, we always have a battle between engineers and designers. The original design of the PS Vita, for example, was very much thinner than the current retail product,” he said. “From a designer’s point of view, thinner is better-looking, but the engineers wanted to put all the features in.

“Maybe it will become thinner in the future, but the engineers would have to come up with a means to do that. The main effort for me was to make this product happen. The buttons and analogue sticks were perhaps not in the best position from a design point of view, but we felt they were the best solution from a publisher’s point of view.

“As a designer, I wanted to use metal rather than plastic,” he added, “but because there are a lot of antennae in the body, we couldn’t use metal.”

You can read the full interview with Sogabe here, in which he also discusses the challenges involved in designing Vita’s dual analogue sticks.

Are you picking up a Vita at launch and if so, which model are you going to plump for? Cast your eyes over our PS Vita review, if you haven’t already, and don’t forget the PS Vita release dateis less than a month away now.

[Source:CVG]

Politics isn’t my thing. I find the roundabout debates of our world leaders to be quite, oh what’s the word… boring, yeah that’s it. Oh, and tedious. And hypocritical. And- Well, I could go on forever now couldn’t I? So this SOPA thing flew under my radar. Until recently, SOPA meant soup. What can I say, I watch Dora the explorer. Then of course, there was that whole internet going black thing. So thanks Wikipedia, got my attention. Some critics say that’s all that was, a desperate cry for help through abuse of internetty powers. Well guess what? That’s exactly what that stupid anti piracy bill is!

I won’t go into details ‘cause quite frankly I can’t. I’m a class A ranter extraordinaire, not a political analyst. But here’s what all of us should know. If this bill gets passed along with it’s equally hideous twin PIPA, the internet will feel like a wasteland. Wait, maybe this is what the Mayans meant! Apocalypse not in the real world, but in the virtual. Why? ‘Cause most of the internet is about sharing information, sharing entertainment, sharing everything! The ability to do that will be drastically limited with SOPA and PIPA. These bills were written so poorly that the people who wrote it could be dubbed absolutely clueless. Clueless to the culture of the internet, clueless to the future ramifications of what such incompetently written laws could do, clueless to the eventual outcry, and clueless to the absolute obvious result that we all saw unfold after January 18, 2012.

You see, what these bills are fighting? It’s not just some community anymore. The people that use the internet, that share their memes, their stories, their culture, their world, these people form a country more solidly unified than any you’d see on a map. Sure it’s citizens like to start flame wars and act like dorks on any forum, but they’re unified in the way that they like to use the country in which they reside. And when the man taxes the citizens so hard that they’ve got nothing left to share, you can’t be surprised by the sure fire revolt. After millions signed petitions, 10 million of those being patriotic American voters, supporters of the bills started a game of hide and seek, with SOPA itself being shelved indefinitely.

All I’m picturing now though is a lurking shark, fin barely exposed, lying low in the information super highway. People shouldn’t forget the people in power and what they would gain if this law or something like it passes. One must stay vigilant! Yeah, even gamers. Think about it, what would we all do without Robo Unicorn Attack? Or Red vs. Blue? What would we do if we couldn’t spoof Skyrim with countless arrow to the knee and Fus Roh Dah videos? We’d be lost! Lost to fine memes from *gasp* newspapers!

Ok, I feel I’ve said enough. While researching a little for this little nugget of rant gold, I noticed I had difficulty clicking on SOPA articles. Then my internet went down.

I am being watched. Oop, goosepimples….

[Tukkolabs]

Another reason for investors to run from the game industry’s most desperate company.

The truth about Zynga (NASDAQ: ZNGA [FREE Stock Trend Analysis]) has been known for quite some time. But over the past few months, it has become painfully clear that the overhyped social gaming entity was destined to die.

This week Benzinga learned of another reason why Zynga is in trouble: the company currently loses $150 on every new paying customer.

“That’s our math; that’s not what the company says,” Arvind Bhatia, an interactive entertainment analyst with Sterne Agee, told Benzinga this week. “They’ve given us the sales in marketing dollars for the first nine months – $120 million. Almost all of that is for acquiring customers. We also know that they had 3.4 million unique payers in the September quarter, which is up from 3 million at the end of December 2010. In other words, they added 400,000 additional payers and they spent $120 million to acquire them.”

That’s the math, Bhatia said – $120 million divided by 400,000 new paying customers, which equals $300 per person.

“Now, what does that mean?” Bhatia continued. “Is it high? Is it low? It’s high to begin with, but we know that generally they say that a person is staying with Zynga for about 12 to 15 months. We know that, on average, these people are spending about $150 or so. Our concern is [whether or not it's worth] spending $300 to get these customers when people are spending $150. That math won’t work for very long.”

The Not-So-Pretty Picture

I asked Bhatia if he believed that Zynga’s troubles were a sign of things to come for the social gaming industry.

“I think it’s telling us [about] a slowdown in social gaming in general,” Bhatia replied. “I don’t think it’s just Zynga. But Zynga clearly has tried many games, and they’re finding that the interest level isn’t necessarily going up. We’ve seen many games launch and then fade within a few weeks.”

Historically, Bhatia said that Zynga’s games used to thrive for several months before peaking. “FarmVille peaked after eight or nine months,” he said. “CityVille peaked after three months and then stayed at high levels for a long time.”

The same cannot be said for Mafia Wars, Pioneer Trail, or Adventure World.

“Those [games] are peaking within a couple of weeks and then coming down very rapidly,” Bhatia explained. “They have to replace what is inevitably slower growth from the existing titles with newer titles, and clearly the newer titles aren’t as strong.

“Not immediately, but down the road this is going to catch up with them – whether it takes three quarter or four quarters is hard to say. But our projection for the next 12 to 15 months is that growth is slowing significantly. That’s with us giving them a lot of credit for the possibility that they will add more payers and that [each payer] will pay more.”

Ultimately, Bhatia said that Zynga needs “stronger growth than what I think they’re headed for.”

“When Facebook was in rapid growth mode, millions and millions of new people were trying these Zynga games just by default, and now it’s getting harder,” Bhatia explained. “They talk about mobile, but I don’t know [how much] mobile growth [can be monetized], and what kind of revenue they’re getting.”

Bhatia said that his suspicion is that mobile revenue is not very large (yet).

“I think on Facebook we’ve seen other companies’ games come under pressure,” he said. “Part of it might be Zynga, given that they’re the leader. Part of it might be a slowdown overall in social games. Part of it might just be Facebook itself. Facebook’s growth rate would have slowed down given the law of large numbers.”

Originality or Lack Thereof?

It’s no secret that Zynga’s games are all very similar. The company has been rehashing the same design concepts since the day it started. That, obviously, could be one of the social entity’s biggest problems.

“When we say that traffic hasn’t gone up despite new introductions, that’s telling us that maybe people are moving from one game to another, but you’re not really getting a lot of incremental people trying them,” Bhatia explained. “The really hardcore are, perhaps, finding themselves trying FarmVille, Castle World and CityVille. The newer audiences are trying and finding that this is all the same and leaving.

“Again, the fact that there is such a small base of people who actually pay says that your risk is tremendous. This is spread out over 20 million people. You could say, ‘Oh yeah, 5% could get bored.’ Although, you only have 2% of your people paying, and God forbid if those guys get bored.”

New Talent

Last year, a handful of prominent developers and execs left their respective companies to come to Zynga. One of them was Mark Turmell, the creator of NFL Blitz and NBA Jam. Turmell left Electronic Arts (NASDAQ: EA) – the company that now owns the rights to Turmell’s leading games – to become the senior creative director at Zynga.

Why did he make the move? And why did Zynga want him to come aboard?

“Honestly I think it’s to be determined,” said Bhatia. “I don’t think it’d be fair to comment without knowing what these guys are working on. I want to give them the benefit of the doubt. But I think ultimately the proof is gonna be in the pudding. We’re looking at the games that are coming out right now. Maybe the pipeline gets better. We are monitoring Hidden Chronicles to see what that does. We’ll keep monitoring.”

Rolling the Dice

With regard to Zynga’s stock, Bhatia said that he thinks it went up recently “because of the speculation on online gambling.”

“There’s an opportunity there,” he said. “But as we said in our note this [week], we think that’s a long shot. Zynga has gamers, not gamblers. That’s a different list. People are kind of confusing and saying, ‘Oh, it’s the same people.’ No, it’s not. These [Zynga players] are people who just want to play for 15 minutes; they don’t want to spend $100 playing poker.

“My point is, Zynga doesn’t necessarily have an inherent advantage in online gaming versus the established players. So to me that was just noise, and I think when people look at the fundamentals, they will realize that online gambling may or may not be legalized. If it is legalized, the opportunity may or may not materialize. It’s down the road. Near-term, traffic is slower. That matters more.”

Zynga’s 15 Minutes of Fame

Despite the less-than-stellar outlook for Zynga, Bhatia believes that there is a market for what the company offers.

“I think there is a place for that 15-minute play,” he said. “I think it’s getting harder and harder. Some people will pay. There are whales. We all know there are people who will spend $50,000 on stuff like this. Same thing with casinos. But I do not think that’s going to be common. I think companies are going to have to give more and more stuff away for free, not the other way around.”

And it’s not just social games that are suffering. Other PC games are also taking a hit.

“We’re even seeing games like World of Warcraft [incur] subscriber losses after seven years,” said Bhatia. “They’ve had to give levels for free. After a while I think it becomes tougher, so Zynga will have to find their next FarmVille. That’s the bottom line. Until they can find that, if it’s all incremental stuff that people are not really crazy about, it’s gonna be tough to put up the kinds of growth numbers that the stock’s multiple is implying. I think that’s going to be tough to do.”

[Source:Benzinga]