Betable claims to give developers 6-month lead on Zynga for real-money gambling | Hacker News Reader

Betable claims to give developers 6-month lead on Zynga for real-money gambling

tech.fortune.cnn.com

39 pointsfollowmylee24 comments

TL;DR version: Chris Griffin (Betable CEO) gets Alex Konrad, a "journalist", to ask Zynga to acquire them.

Seriously, journalist in scare quotes there because any real journalist would say to Chris, "Dude, if your so hot to sell yourself to Zynga just call the guy, its not like its hard to find his number or anything." Instead we get a long piece about how Zynga has to get into real money gambling and how Betable will accelerate that move if they were to be acquired.

Except that its illegal to offer online real money gambling in the US, the US government has gone so far as to violate world trade organization rules [1] to shut down non-US companies from offering gambling, and regulatory constraints such as Sarbanes-Oxley would put uncomfortable personal liability on a US based company officer if that company was even capable of violating the rules here.

That is why 'getting into real-money gambling' is at best a 3 year plan and more likely a 5 year plus plan. Change the laws, change the regulations, and then figure out how to operate under them.

[1] http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5icdh9Q_kfrAZTnf22OUpjZvu...

I also especially loved his credulity wrt the 1-hour integration estimate.

Any idea why it is illegal to offer real money online gambling in the US? I'm sure it's not hard for US citizens to gamble online if they like using foreign websites. Just seems to be a way to lose a lot of taxable revenue from a high profit business sector.

There is a lot of history available, I cringe when I provide wikipedia links but its got a good summary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_gambling and you can follow the off site links for the definitive story.

People think other people have gambling problems. People want to protect other people from themselves. I really wish people would leave me alone.

The U.S. merely banned foreign corporations from offering gambling to U.S. citizens. This is perfectly legal under WTO rules and treaties.

The problem was that the U.S. exempteddomestic companies from the same restriction (basically, the law exempted horse racing from remote gambling restrictions). Consequently, the entire foreign prohibition was ruled discriminatory by the WTO (and not just the portion applying to horse racing).

The gist of the WTO ruling was that it is perfectly acceptable for a country to impose restrictions on foreign corporations as long as those same restrictions apply to domestic corporations.

> Except that its illegal to offer online real money gambling in the US

They are only offering gambling where it's legal, so the UK and other places like that.

Betable has been banging their drum for ages now, but unless they change their strategy I doubt they are going to get anywhere.

There are simply no examples of a games using their platform, or at least I was unable to find one, and as a developer, why would I risk developing one in that situation?

Someone's gotta be first, right? And if it did work, the payoff could be huge. I see what you're saying tho--we're hesitant as well. I would love to see an example of an iOS app released that integrates Betable. This FAQ (https://betable.freshdesk.com/solution/categories/17300/fold...) makes it sound like it's at least allowed.

If your going to have a "Someone's gotta be first" problem, then you need to make sure that solving that problem is part of your business plan.

Having failed to find anybody out there willing to take the risk, at this point they need to be paying to commission games to use their platform or develop some in house if they want to have any chance of convincing developers that the platform even works.

I'm not risking Federal Pound-Me-In-The-Ass-Prison over getting a few gamblers to spend money in my game. Someone at Betable claims they have really good protections in place for this but I don't think U.S. devs should go near it.

Over in the UK its legal, but what is Betable going to do when there's an FBI sting on your studio for violating U.S. gambling laws? These are serious issues that need to be considered.

See my comment (and presumably a response from someone at Betable) here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4222024

This reminded me that in US online poker is illegal now, which I find pretty ridiculous.

In the US:

Betting on sports online is illegal.

In Washington State, playing online poker is a felony.

The UIEGA, which forced the three largest online poker sites to shut down, defines a gambling act as "a bet or wager to include risking something of value on the outcome of a contest, sports event, or a game subject to chance."

However, fantasy sports is excluded, including "daily" fantasy sports games, where players win or lose money based on the outcome of as few as three games.

How much government time and taxpayer money is wasted restricting how people spend their money, for the sole purpose of pandering to Harrah's Entertainment and the like?

Fantasy sports pools are not bets on the outcome of a contest, sports event, or game subject to chance.

The point of fantasy sports is what happens during the game, specifically, the performance of individual players. The actual outcome of the event is of no consequence. Furthermore, the players are not engaged in a contest on the stats which are used to determine the outcome of the fantasy pool (i.e., they are not formally competing to get the most 1st downs, or most catches, etc.). In some sports, the competitors are competing on the basis of stats (i.e., in boxing hits landed is one of the factors that determines the final score of the match), so fantasy pools for such sports would be illegal.

These are silly distinctions, but it is what makes fantasy sports legal and normal sports betting illegal.

Surely the fantasy game itself is a game subject to chance, and so betting on it would be illegal?

No, because the outcome of fantasy sports depends on the skill of the players (but is not dependent on the actual outcome of the "sport event" itself). It only becomes a matter of chance if you are betting on the result in specific statistics, because then it becomes a matter of chance as to whether they will reach/beat that specific number bet.

It's still dependent on the outcome of individual events in the game, which are partially determined by luck, right?

No, individual events in the game are largely determined by skill. In some situations, i.e., kickoffs, the location where the ball lands is subject to "luck" (because humans do not have the motor skills for the sort of precision for it to be completely "skill"), but the rest of the play is skill-driven.

Betting on individual events would be subject to the gambling law as gambling on "sports events" because the individual events are themselves "sports events" and bettors at that point would be gambling on their outcome.

Sure, it's a combination of skill and luck. But there's definitely luck involved. Are you saying that, in the eyes of the law, there is no luck?

Considering Zynga has $1.2Bn in cash on hand, I'm surprised they haven't already bought a gambling company outright by now

That sounds great but last I checked they where still burning money fairly quickly.

You checked wrong- they've been profitable for a while now.

Umm, in there own words there not profitable:

http://investor.zynga.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=695419

Quarter ended June 30, 2012 Revenue $332,493, Net income (loss) ($22,811)

6 months ending June 30, 2012 Revenue: $653,465 Net income (loss): ($108,162)

You might say it's a positive trend and there losses are decreasing, but they had some profits last year that are 1/10th their current losses.

I suppose it depends if you're looking at the GAAP(negative) or non GAAP earnings(positive). I'm not sure which one tells the truth, but most press sources seem to cite a positive EPS of $0.01. In any case, this is not really a company that's hemorrhaging money.

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