In spite of the recent layoffs, Zynga is still picking up talent in strategic areas like social casino gaming. The company bought a roughly 40-person team called Spooky Cool Labs full of real-money gaming talent. Based in Chicago, the Spooky Cool Labs team is made up of social and real money gaming veterans from companies such as Aristocrat, and slot machine makers like IGT (International Game Technology) and WMS Gaming. The company’s founder, Joe Kaminkow, was ranked as one of the 10 most influential people in the history of slots by Strictly Slots Magazine. But from Spooky Cool’s website, the…

A design studio founded by a longtime slot machine industry veteran has been acquired by social gaming giant Zynga, which is seeking an avenue into Nevada’s gaming market. San Francisco-based Zynga, developer of “Farmville,” “Words With Friends,” and other freeplay social games, did not disclose a purchase price for Spooky Cool Labs. The 40-person game studio, which is based in Chicago, focuses on developing social casino games. Spooky Cool Labs was founded by veteran slot machine designer Joe Kaminkow, who spent more than a two decades with International Game Technology, developing some of the casino industry’s best performing slot machine…

The great investment thesis behind Zynga was that it would eventually turn its play-money Zynga Poker game into a wildly lucrative online poker business, rivaling even the most established players in gaming. There was a time when an idea like that wasn’t too far-fetched. Zynga Poker has around 36 million users every month on Facebook with around 6 million of those on the site every day. The problem is that online poker isn’t legal here in the U.S., so this huge user base hasn’t translated to a significant profit. First-quarter revenue dropped 18% and the fickle nature of online-game players has…

From USA Today SAN FRANCISCO — Zynga CEO Mark Pincus may have an ace up his sleeve after all to save the troubled social games company he founded. UltimatePoker.com on Tuesday delivered Nevada residents a first taste of real-money Internet gambling, a move that could soon be dealt up by Zynga — not to mention others in high-tech, such as payment-processors like PayPal. “It’s a significant opportunity for Zynga,” IDC analyst Lewis Ward says of the company’s online gambling prospects. Billions of dollars could be in the offing after Ultimate Gaming, a Las Vegas-based casino operation, launches the first fully…