The results of a four-month investigation by 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft, producer Ira Rosen, and The Washington Post's two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Gilbert Gaul will appear this Sunday, November 30, at 7 p.m. EST/PST on 60 Minutes.
The collaboration by the two news organizations reveals how online poker players suspecting cheating were forced to successfully ferret out the cheaters themselves. That's because managers of the mostly unregulated $18 billion Internet gambling industry failed to respond to their complaints.
"He was raising, just really, really bad hands against very good hands. He seemed to play crazy," says Todd Witteles, a computer scientist turned poker player who believed he was losing too much to the same person. "It seemed like he was giving his money away. Except the only thing was, he wasn't losing. He was playing in a style that was sure to lose, but he was killing the game day after day," Witteles, who played a key detective role, remembers.
Michael Josem, a player and a computer security expert, plotted the odds of such consistent success. "We did the mathematical analysis to find that they were winning at about 15 standard deviations above the mean...approximately equivalent to winning a one-in-a-million jackpot six consecutive times."
The cheating, which netted the cheaters more than $20 million, occurred on two of the Internet's most popular sites, Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet. The two sites operate out of a shopping mall in Costa Rica and run their games on computer servers housed on an Indian reservation outside of Montreal. They are licensed by a Mohawk tribe that has no background in casino gambling, a tribe that previously made the majority of its money selling tax-free tobacco.
Though such gambling is illegal in both Canada and the U.S., the betting laws in those countries have no jurisdiction on the sovereign reservation.
Nickelodeon's AddictingGames, one of the largest gaming sites for teens in the United States, is turning itself into a social hangout for generation Y and their younger brothers and sisters.
This week, the company will announce several steps to turn its Flash-based games site into more of a community for teen players. By the end of October, AddictingGames visitors will be able to create a member profile, featuring things like photos, member name, games played, high scores, and a buddy list. At that time, members will also be able to see a high-score list among friends who play the same games, rather than all-time high scores, and they'll have the ability to challenge friends or join them immediately in a game when they log on.
Users will also have an IM application to chat with friends, according to Dave Williams, senior vice president of the Games Group at Nickelodeon's Kids and Family that formed in June. (For instant messaging, AddictingGames plans to use social network Meebo's Community IM service, due in the fall.) But despite these features, Williams was careful to say that it won't be another social network.
"Our big focus now is community," Williams said in an interview with CNET News this week. "Games were always meant to be social."
AddictingGames, which attracted its largest audience of about 10.7 million U.S. monthly visitors in June, according to ComScore Media Metrix, is stepping up its social game at a time when casual gaming, socializing and user-created content are converging online and on the mobile phone, particularly for kids and teens. An estimated 86 percent of teens on the Internet regularly play games, and most of them belong to a social network and own a mobile phone.
While the company has stiff competition from the likes of game providers Miniclip, Yahoo and Kongregate, even more challenging for AddictingGames might be to keep the attention of capricious teens--especially its main constituency of teenage boys. Last year, Nickelodeon said that it would invest as much as $100 million in online and casual games, and part of that money is being funneled into making its game sites more "sticky" with profiles and chat.
To be fair, another site that Williams heads up in the Games Group, Shockwave.com, has been trying out many of these social features already.
Shockwave, a casual game site geared more for older audiences like mom gamers, has had member profiles since late last year. Since that time, the profiles have boosted the time spent on the site by 30 percent, to roughly 47 minutes a month, according to Williams. (Players spend an average of 30 minutes monthly on AddictingGames, according to ComScore.) In that vein, Shockwave has also recently began letting members create a so-called virtual talking avatar for a profile page. Members can designate for the avatar a gender, voice type and accent, as well as give it scripted text so it speaks for them on the profile page.
Part of the strategy to keep teens attention is to constantly introduce new games, some of them "flirty," according to Williams. AddictingGames has about 3,000 games on its site, adding between 12 and 20 new ones every week. "New game Friday" features a bulk roll out of nine new games at once, many from its user community.
AddictingGames, which became a part of Nickelodeon and MTVN when their parent Viacom bought Atom Entertainment for $200 million in August 2006, is also leaning toward more social games. Those are games that ask for player's creativity and collaboration.
As little as a year ago, online games were geared much more to a solo experience, ala Solitaire. But now casual games are encouraging more interaction among players. Pencil Racer, for example, is a game that asks players to draw their own track, upload it to the site, and pick from a range of vehicles, like a monkey on a bike, with which to race. The game was launched only a few months ago, and people have already created more than 1 million different race tracks.
"We have lots of kids cutting their teeth making new games," said Williams. A 15-year-old boy from Sweden, for example, built a popular shooter game called Clear Vision.
Because Addicting Games caters to a younger audience, Williams said that it will be sure to promote teen safety when it introduces profiles and other social features later this year. For example, kids under the age of 13 will not be able to sign up for an account, and members over the age of 18 will not be able to "friend" those under 18 years old.
As for how it makes money, the site sells advertisements and sponsorships for its more popular games, and it has been profitable for years, according to Williams. AddictingGames, for example, recently created a version of Pencil Racer that allowed players to race a T-Mobile phone.
Not to ignore the trends in mobile gaming, Williams said that his division is looking closely at games for the iPhone. But he said that there was nothing to announce at this time. The company already sells a pack of Flash-for-mobile games called "addicting quickies" for Verizon phones.
Yahoo Games announced on Thursday that it will expand into ad-supported online games by the end of the year, a move not without its controversy.
Yahoo Games expects to offer more than 400 ad-supported downloadable games via assistance from casual-game advertising network and technology players Double Fusion and NeoEdge Networks.
Under the partnership, Double Fusion and NeoEdge will sell and integrate video ads before, during, and after a game, which is downloaded from Yahoo Games. NeoEdge also is providing technology that will enable Yahoo to insert ads into its game library without requiring the game source code.
Yahoo, however, still plans to retain the ability for users to continue receiving paid game downloads, sans advertising appearing on the games.
That flexibility may be key in satisfying players who may not necessary want ads tucked into a shooter game or a jam session, nor ads scrolling by before or after a game. Nonetheless, Yankee Group Research projects worldwide in-game advertising to soar to $971.3 million by 2011 from $77.7 million in 2006.
Yahoo Games plans to offer ad-supported downloadable games from such publishers as Alawar Entertainment, Big Fish Games, and Last Day of Work.
The CNET Redballers are off to a good start in the online game 'Baseball Boss' against the 1907 Brooklyn Superbas, soon to be known as the Dodgers.
(Credit: Baseballboss.com)A new online baseball game may finally help put to rest an age-old debate: how would Babe Ruth do at the plate facing Nolan Ryan's fastball?
That is the kind of scenario that may be possible soon with Baseball Boss, a free browser-based game released Thursday that combines fantasy sports with virtual baseball card collecting. The game allows fantasy managers to build teams with Major League Baseball players from 1907 and 2007 (more years will be added later) that can play other user-created teams or even historical teams such as the 1907 Brooklyn Superbas. Instead of focusing on stat categories such as stolen bases and home runs, this game cobbles together the entire team's likely performance to give you a final game score.
When managers register for a team, they are assigned 40 players, which are represented by trading cards. From that team, managers can trade for other cards with other managers, purchase cards at auction from other managers using points earned from wins, or purchase premium card packs with real money. My team featured a bunch of players I had not heard of or barely remembered, but presumably (after their career years are added) one could eventually acquire players such as Cy Young, Ted Williams, Willie Mays, or Alex Rodriguez. Even Pete Rose would be a good bet.
This is truly a casual game that can be played in a few minutes rather than the week-long contests that most fantasy baseball managers are used to. Managers make challenges and games are played in about 5 to 15 minutes--managers don't even have to be online while the game is under way. The computer determines the winner of each game based on chance and actual player statistics. Results appear immediately, presenting box scores and inning-by-inning play on how the teams did, or managers can choose to watch the game unfold on the diamond via Flash.
The use of the players was made possible through a multiyear licensing deal with Major League Baseball Advanced Media with creator Challenge Online Games, which announced a $4.5 million investment from Sequoia Capital on Thursday. Challenge Online games is also the creator of the role-paying game Duels.
This game is billed as a nostalgic twist on online fantasy baseball play, which, like real baseball has gone through many incarnations in the past three decades. On one side are the baseball cards, which used to be for kids; we would trade,
Starting in the late-'80s, thanks perhaps in part to Kevin Costner movies and steroids, fans rediscovered the game, and a decade later, the rotisserie baseball leagues tracked in three-ring binders were replaced by online drag-and-drop fantasy baseball leagues.
In that spirit of rediscovery, this game may create baseball fans out of casual gamers, while offering a chance to reminisce to those of us who have been wearing a spongy index finger since childhood.
As for the great Ruth and Ryan debate, you will have to find out for yourself. As the saying goes, that's why we play the games.
When Roelof Botha struggled to buy a $10 pack of virtual armor and weaponry from the casual-game site Duels earlier this year, it turned out to be good fortune for the site's creator, Challenge Games.
Botha, a venture capitalist with Sequoia Capital and former CFO of PayPal, e-mailed customer support at the time to get help with his transaction, but then struck up a conversation with the site's founder, Andrew Busey, who recalled the meeting in an interview. Busey told Botha his plan to create a new class of games--free, short-form browser-based games--and Botha liked the idea.
"How often do you get VCs buying stuff on your site, before you even start talking to them," said Busey, the creator of instant messaging application iChat (now used by Apple).
On Thursday, Challenge Games will announce that Sequoia Capital has invested $4.5 million in the company, along with angel investors such as Ron Conway. Challenge Games has also launched its second game in less than a year, Baseball Boss. The new game--a cross between baseball card collecting and fantasy sports--was made possible through a multiyear licensing deal with Major League Baseball Advanced Media.
Casual online games are a big focus for investors lately because of the genre's growing popularity among Web surfers. In recent months, Shasta Ventures and Accel Partners put $10 million in Mochi Media, an advertising network for casual-game sites; Time Warner and GGV Capital sunk $40 million into Turbine, creator of online games like the Lord of the Rings; and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos invested $3 million in gaming startup Kongregate.
Busey, who co-founded social media software company Pluck before starting Challenge Games, said that he's carving out a new genre of games that operate somewhere between the downloadable multiplayer epics like World of Warcraft--which people play for hours at a time--and quick casual online games like Scrabulous. Challenge Games let players develop a character and collect goods, but are designed to be played for more like 20 minutes at a time. Its seminal game, Duels, launched last August and has about 250,000 registered users who spend an average of 20 minutes each session.
With the money, the company plans to launch a new trading-card game in September; and following that, it will introduce another game every three months, according to Busey. The games are free, but the company makes money from the sale of virtual goods. With luck, since its relationship with Botha, Challenge Games has hammered out the kinks of its payment system.
- prev
- 1
- next
