Bee Cave Games today revealed that it has closed an initial seed investment round of over $1.4 million from from employees, select private investors and a strategic investment from Glu Mobile.

The Company’s first title, Blackjack Casino, is now in private beta on Facebook, with mobile and tablet versions in development as well.

Bee Cave Games is a social and mobile games developer founded in late 2012 by former Zynga employees Erik Bethke, Nimai Malle, and Jeremy Strauser, all former employees at Zynga’s Austin office, which was significantly downsized last year. Members of the development team have worked on both social and AAA console and PC titles including Zynga’s Texas Hold’em Poker, EA’s NFL games, and Blizzard’s Diablo series.

Real-money gaming platform Betable today announced the newest partner in its private beta program: casual game developer Frima Studio’s new real-money game division 3OAK.

3OAK is a new development studio formed to create casual and social games built featuring real-money gameplay.  Like other developers who have partnered with Betable since the company came out of stealth last summer, 3OAK will be targeting international audiences with the games featuring Betable’s API.

Although real-money gaming has only been seen in social casino games so far, 3OAK isn’t working on these kinds of titles right now. 3OAK director Mikael Lefebvre tells us the studio is working to bring real-money mechanics to genres they haven’t really appeared in so far. As a result, the company has a slate of five game concepts it’s working on, based on the most popular social game types. While he can’t share too many details right now, Lefebvre says the company’s first title will be a humorous/light social RPG which is already in the early testing phase and is expected for an early Q2 launch.

Lefebvre says 3OAK tested out real-money gaming by creating a social game prototype with a cash out mechanic. The prototype showed the retention and engagement were significantly higher than the norm in social games, as well as converting users to paying players. He thinks implementing elements like this will is the way of the future because, “all this makes sense because in the current market the cost of acquiring users is getting higher and higher, so we need higher revenue per user and revenue per paying user.”

While 3OAK’s titles will feature real-money gaming in the territories where such mechanics are legal, Lefebvre tells us they’ll also be available as standard social games in other countries with soft and hard currencies.

Betable CEO Christopher Griffin tells us he’s excited about how 3OAK’s implementing his company’s API; according to Griffin, this is one of the first examples of Betable’s technology in social games outside of the casino genre. He tells us there are other developers working with Betable on non-social casino games, but none of them have been officially unveiled yet.

Griffin believes this is just the start of a larger movement in the social/mobile gaming industries to incorporate real-money elements. “I think this is more than a trend and will be more than a trend,” he says. “This has something that will be very core for how these games monetize and will be essential for them to have some element of real money in them if they want to be competitive.”

Although this is the first time we’ve heard of companies making casual games with real-money mechanics, we’ve known this was a possibility since Betable first came out of stealth. When we initially chatted with Griffin back in July, he provided a mock-up graphic showing how his company’s API would look in mobile titles like Words With Friends and Hero Academy.

Betable’s proven a popular partner in the social/mobile games sector ever since it publicly debuted. Griffin reveals the demand to work with the company has been so great that its team has doubled in size. Before this latest announcement, Betable’s announced partnerships with some major casual gaming companies like Big Fish Games, Digital Chocolate, SGN and Slingo.

3OAK’s first games will be launched for mobile platforms, but the plan is to make them cross-platform sooner rather than later. “Everything has to be cross-platform,” Lefebvre notes.

Playboy Casino is a Facebook game from Gamesys, a London, U.K.-based company responsible for a variety of big-name online casino brands in the U.K. and Europe, including Jackpotjoy, The Sun Bingo, Caesars Casino and the Spanish-language Botemania.

Playboy Casino is a very conventional, run-of-the-mill slot machine simulation. Beginning with a single machine based around a 1950s diner-style aesthetic (with, this being Playboy, a large-breasted, short-skirted waitress acting as a “mascot”), the player spins the reels repeatedly in an attempt to earn money and experience points. Money is used to keep playing for longer and may also be purchased or acquired through various bonuses for playing every day and inviting friends. Experience points, meanwhile, are used to level up and unlock additional machines every few levels, each of which is based around a particular era from Playboy’s history. The slot machine mechanics are the same as in every other Facebook-based slots game — players may bet on one or more “win lines” on the machine in the hope of scoring a winning combination of symbols, wild cards substitute for any symbol and special icons may trigger chance-based minigames for additional winnings.

Each machine has its own distinct audio-visual aesthetic, but all play in fundamentally the same way, albeit with the stakes getting higher on later machines and as the player levels up. Incentive to try all of them is provided by a collection of badges and trophies, which encourage the player to try and collect particular combinations of symbols or win in certain ways, but given the fact that the player has absolutely no control over the machine beyond telling it which lines to bet on and when to spin, acquiring these is more a matter of luck and persistence than any skill at gambling effectively. The different aesthetics for the machines are rather inconsistent in quality — the 1950s diner machine, for example, has very sparse sound effects that are not great at giving feedback to the player; the subsequent 1960s-themed machine, meanwhile, has a much “fuller” soundtrack, with music and considerably more obvious audible feedback for winnings and the like. (more…)

Zynga Elite Slots is Zynga’s latest game for Facebook, and an attempt to shake up the slot machine genre — a style of social game which, while popular and profitable, tends to consistently play it safe and not try anything new.

The concept behind Zynga Elite Slots is that the game combines elements of a standard Facebook multi-line slot machine with a cooperative role-playing game. The slots angle is very traditional, but it’s the additions to that formula that make Zynga Elite Slots stand out somewhat.

The game begins with a tutorial to explain the new ideas that Zynga Elite Slots brings to the table, and in a move highly worthy of praise, this tutorial may be skipped completely if the player desires. The tutorial walks players through how the slot machine works (including how to change their bet and the number of lines) and the manner in which the game’s RPG-style mechanics work. (more…)

Zynga’s blend of social casino and mid-core role-playing game, Zynga Elite Slots, today arrived on Facebook.

As we learned last month from Design Director Josh Gause (who co-developed Bingo Blitz), Zynga Elite Slots features a combination of slots gameplay with cooperative multiplayer elements and and boss battles. Players are represented in a window at the top of the game canvas by one of 24 pets (all but two of which can be acquired by grinding), who run along a path with each slots spin. Users play their slots games alongside 149 other players in a slots room, with all of the spins contributing to a communal progress bar; when the bar is filled, everyone in the room participates in a boss battle that provides bonus content.

Zynga Elite Slots is an interesting idea because it combines two highly lucrative genres —mid-core and social casino— into one casual title. The game is currently only available on Facebook and is expected to come to Zynga.com at some point in the future, although no  launch date for that version has been announced yet.

Tune in tomorrow for our review of Zynga Elite Slots.

Real money gaming platform Betable today announced it had hired Jonathan Flesher as its new Executive Vice President of Business Development.

Flesher comes to Betable most recently from Zynga, where he was the company’s Vice President and General Manager of Business Development. Prior to Zynga, Flesher worked at companies like JP Morgan, Electronic Arts (where he served as Senior Director of Business Development) and private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. Flesher’s LinkedIn account shows he left Zynga in November 2012, part of the ongoing high-profile series of departures the casual gaming giant’s seen over the past couple of months.

Since Betable came out of stealth in July 2012, the company’s generated a great deal of interest from the development community because of the extra potential revenue stream its API represents. As a result, we’re told several thousand characters have signed up to take part in Betable’s private beta program, but Betable’s announced partnerships with Slingo, Digital Chocolate, SGN, Murka, and Big Fish. Although Betable is based in San Francisco, its servers are in the United Kingdom, which allows the API to add real money gaming to titles in any country that allow online gambling.

Betable hasn’t revealed how many games are using its API, but we’re told the early results are exceeding the company’s expectations.

Late last year, developer Fanhood launched Fanhood Sports on Facebook, providing users with a casual sports betting social casino game. We sat down to talk with Fanhood Founder and CEO Brandon Ramsey to talk about what Fanhood Sports does differently from other social casino games, as well as his thoughts on where social casino games are headed.

Ramsey comes to the game industry from the monetization side of the web. He used to work at Yahoo!, leveraging their various commerce sites like Yahoo! Shopping and Yahoo! Deals. In 2009, he co-founded the auction site BigDeal.com, which he then sold off and decided to get directly into games. For Ramsey, it’s the perfect time to do so, as he believes, “social casino games are going to outgrow the rest of social games in about a year.

“I thought there was a massive opportunity with social casino games. On top of that, Facebook is kind of also identifying sports as a big opportunity.”

Even though sports betting isn’t terribly prevalent in the social casino game space right now (instead, slots and poker games are dominant), Ramsey tells us it’s only a matter of time before the genre becomes its own force to be reckoned with simply because there are so many sports fans around the world. This is especially true in the international community, where sports like soccer and cricket (which aren’t as popular here in the United States) have 3 billion and 2 billion fans respectively around the globe.

For Ramsey, though, the most important thing was creating a sports betting title that had the potential to be incredibly deep but was also a snackable game experience for sports fans. As a result, the betting isn’t just limited to which teams will win. Players can also bet on trivia-like predictions like which player will score more points in a game, or who will throw the most yards in the National Football League  next week, and there are also minigames like one that has players create Bingo-like matches on a score card based on their predictions. (more…)

Late last year, Slotomania developer Playtika launched its new affiliate program, Playground. We recently sat down with Playtika’s User Acquisitions Group Leader Adam Jaffe to talk about Playground and how it’s furthering Slotomania’s presence in the social games space.

Playground is Slotomania’s new program allowing affiliates and media partners the ability to pull tracking links and banners, check on campaign results and review status payments. It’s described to us as a “one stop shop” for people looking to make money by sending players over to Slotomania.com.

The program pays out based on two different models: CPA and revenue sharing. A CPA is described as “anyone who makes a first time transaction through Slotomania.com.” For CPAs, Playtika pays on a graduated scale based on each first time deposit (FTD). As FTDs are made, the system keeps track and adjusts the payouts based on volume and time period.

With revenue sharing, every new affiliate who chooses this option receives an increasing portion of revenue. According to Jaffe, “For the first month we are going to give 80 percent rev-share, the second month 60 percent, the third month 40 percent.  Then, depending on the quality of the traffic the fourth month, the rate will be adjusted accordingly.” (more…)

Fresh Deck Poker is a cross-platform poker game that has been available on Facebook for a while, and more recently received an iOS version. Said iOS version was recently updated to be fully optimized for iPad, iPhone 5 and iPad mini play, and an Android version is reported to be in the works for release very soon. The game is the product of Idle Games, last seen with the visually-impressive but ultimately disappointing Facebook title Idle Worship, and makes use of the massively multiplayer platform developed for that game.

This review is based on the iOS version, tested on an iPhone 4S running iOS 6.0.

Players may begin playing Fresh Deck Poker either as a guest or by connecting to Facebook. If the latter option is chosen, this allows the player to sync their progress between play on the social network and play on the go. Players may not customize the name displayed for themselves, though since the game does not display their Facebook profile picture and only displays their first name and last initial, there is little chance of them being personally identified. They may, however, select an avatar to represent themselves in the game. A selection of these are unlocked from the outset of the game, with others becoming available either through the expenditure of hard currency or by gaining experience levels through normal play.

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Mobile social game developer Storm8 is about to launch Bingo!, its newest social casino game under the its Shark Party brand.

Bingo! is being launched under Storm8′s Shark Party brand (which is focused on social casino games). The company was started in 2009 by former employees of Facebook and bootstrapped by its founders, but the company proved immediately profitable. Co-founder and CEO Perry Tam tells us, “The advantage to [being bootstrapped] is that we can focus 100 percent of our efforts on building our business – and that is to be the best in any game or category we pursue. Being self-funded puts us in control of our destiny.”

Back in November, Storm8 announced it had surpassed over 400 million downloads on mobile devices. The developer’s first casino game was Slots, which has consistently been listed in the top 100 grossing apps on iTunes  since it launched this Spring.

This new social casino title comes just a month after Storm8 launched its match-3 title Jewel Mania for mobile devices. That game’s been performing even better than Slots, as it’s still within the top 100 charts for both Top grossing and top free titles on both iPhone and iPad.

Currently, Storm8 has its own label, as well as three different game brands: Shark Party, TeamLava and FireMocha. Each of these brands cater to different types of gamers, with the first two focusing on different types of casual players and FireMocha targeting more mid-core or harcore players. Tam tells us each of these brands’ games are designed to be free-to-play, supported by in-app purchases. The Storm8 brand is used for the company’s more popular massively multiplayer online titles like World War and iMobsters.

Even though Storm8 is expanding its catalog of social mobile casino games, the company isn’t interested in pursuing real-money gaming. Tam tells us, “Storm8’s business model remains focused on growing our mobile social games; we don’t have plans to expand into real-money gaming at this time.”