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Nevada gaming board shuts down daily fantasy because it's gambling
While daily fantasy games (DraftKings, FanDuel and others like them) may have gotten a special exemption for online betting from Congress in 2006, today the Nevada Gaming Control Board decided they do constitute gambling, and shut down their operations (PDF) in the state. Daily fantasy games were already banned totally in some states (Arizona, Iowa, Louisiana, Montana and Washington), but the home of Las Vegas casino gaming is another matter entirely. This follows a tough couple of weeks for the multi-billion dollar industry which has come under scrutiny because so many employees of the two largest competing sites were playing and winning on each other's sites, with questions over whether they could possibly use insider information to get an edge. Both sites have since banned their employees from playing, but the controversy has not gone away.
DraftKings bans employees from betting on fantasy games
Well that didn't take long. After a strong, almost oppressive initial marketing blitz at the start of the NFL season and the announcement that it would soon expand into eSports, DraftKings has come under fire for insider trading. An employee at the company reportedly used non-public information to place winning bets on rival fantasy gaming site, FanDuel, and net roughly $350,000 in a week. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has already opened an investigation into the scheme but not before the DraftKings preemptively banned its employees from putting money down on these games.
DraftKings is expanding its online gambling services to eSports
Online gambling site DraftKings told Re/code on Wednesday that it will expand its fantasy services beyond professional baseball and American football. Beginning next month, DraftKing users will be able to test their fantasy team management mettle in the rapidly-growing realm of eSports. In fact, the new service is slated to debut in time for the start of the League of Legends World Championship in October. Additionally, the company will partner six eSports teams for in-event promotions.
eSports gets its first major UK bookmaker
Ignore it all you like, but eSports is booming. There are now million-dollar payouts, doping scandals and even official ways to put money down on your favourite squad. While gambling on eSports is still a relatively new concept, it's just been given a much-needed boost after well-known UK betting site Betway launched its very own gaming portal. The company, which has traditionally focused on football, horse racing, tennis and other "traditional" sports, believes it's the first major bookmaker to expand into competitive gaming.
Yahoo wants you to gamble on fantasy sports
You already use Yahoo Sports to track your fantasy leagues, meticulously crafting winning line-ups each week for the sheer thrill of bragging rights--but what if you want to make it, well, interesting? Now you can: Yahoo just updated its fantasy sports app with daily, real-money tournaments.
Cortana made me a better gambler, but I'm never listening to her again
I'm a bit of a gambler. I've probably placed at least one bet per week for the past year. I'm also pretty good at it -- since winning a few hundred dollars on the World Cup last year, I've maintained a positive account balance at Ladbrokes (other betting sites are available), never adding additional funds, and never betting more than $10 on a single event. Last week, Cortana began predicting English Premier League results, so I decided to see what would happen if I let the Windows Phone (and soon to be Windows 10) assistant make my decisions for me.
Siri can guess sports odds and thinks the Royals will win the World Series
Siri has another neat trick you may not have known about -- gambling speculation. If you ask Siri "who is going to win the World Series?" it will tell you exactly who is currently predicted to win. In this case Siri thinks the Royals are going to take the series. If you have money on the game, don't want to do your own research, and trust a machine to do your betting for you, give Siri a spin. We will say to Siri's credit, when it doesn't know it simply does its best based on which team as a better record. If you're terrible at gambling, but just can't stop, Siri is there for you.
Recommended Reading: Winning (and losing) big on a video poker bug
Recommended Reading highlights the best long-form writing on technology and more in print and on the web. Some weeks, you'll also find short reviews of books that we think are worth your time. We hope you enjoy the read. Finding a Video Poker Bug Made These Guys Rich -- Then Vegas Made Them Pay by Kevin Poulsen, Wired In 2009, John Kane discovered a glitch in video poker machines that allowed him to hit multiple jackpots in a single sitting. Then one night, Kane hit seven in an hour and half, earning over $10,000 and setting off some major red flags with the casino's security. That sum was actually quite modest compared to other days. Wired has the story of how finding a bug in the gambling machines lead to earning a load of cash for a pair of men, until the workaround was discovered.
Star Trek Online hypes a time-limited (but is it really?) lockbox
Cryptic's latest news post details a new promotion involving Star Trek Online's Xindi lockbox. What's inside the Xindi lockbox? How the heck should I know? And isn't that fun! The Xindi lockbox is time-limited because as of October 14, it will no longer be offered as a drop or a reward in STO, according to the blurb. Or will it? After hyping the Xindi, Cryptic uses the very next paragraph to explain how it is unretiring a bunch of supposedly retired lockboxes (including Cardassian, Ferengi, Tholian, Temporal, Dominion, and more). So, be sure and grind hard in order to get your hands on one of those time-limited Xindi lockboxes before they disappear! Or just wait for the next unretirement party, I guess.
Jason Rohrer's new game is a devilish gamble with real money
Jason Rohrer's games are often somewhat ... unconventional. Passage was a game about growing old, and Sleep is Death required players to constantly be engaged with the story they were creating in order to keep the game alive. Now, Rohrer is developing Cordial Minuet, a gambling game with an occult twist. Another twist: you bet, and play for, real money. Here's how it works: two players connect to each other via the internet and, after making their bets, are shown a square with a series of numbered tiles. The numbers shown are different each game, but they always add up to 111. There are six rows and six columns. 666. What one player sees shows up rotated 90 degrees to the other player, so that one player's columns become the other's rows and vice versa. Players each choose two columns, one for themselves and one for their opponent. The idea is that you want the column you choose for yourself and the column your opponent chooses for you to intersect at a high number. On the other side of the scale, you want the column you pick for your opponent and the column they pick for themselves to intersect at a low number. This repeats for several rounds before a winner is declared.
Atari's betting its future on gays and gamblers
"If I had a hole in New Mexico, maybe that one [the Project Runway game] would have made it there." Todd Shallbetter, Atari's chief operating officer, is just joking of course. He's referencing the company's infamous 1983 move to bury countless amounts of unsold gaming hardware and E.T. game cartridges under a slab of cement in the desert. Shallbetter doesn't deny his company's rocky legacy. On the contrary, he embraces it, using its failures as a counterpoint for a new version of Atari he's helping to build. To push the company past the €31.7 million (about $42 million) in revenues it earned in the 2011-2012 fiscal year (PDF), Shallbetter is targeting markets that most companies would rather ignore; markets that represent hundreds of billions of dollars. Atari is going after gays and gamblers.
The Daily Grind: Is in-game gambling fun?
Recently, Star Wars: The Old Republic released a new update that had, among other things, gambling minigames at an in-game casino. It's not the first MMO to add some sort of sanctioned gambling, although it made me wonder just how much demand there is for this sort of thing. On one hand, I'm all for adding more function and features to the game world, even if it's mostly cosmetic and fluffy. Or especially if it's cosmetic and fluffy. Immersion can't begin and end with combat; game worlds should feel alive in a multitude of ways. Plus, giving players more options during a game session is always something I can get behind. On the other hand, if I wanted to gamble online, aren't my needs already met elsewhere? Isn't this a lot of effort for a minigame that will probably get one or two plays from most people before being discarded? What do you think? Is in-game gambling fun? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
The Daily Grind: Are you in tune with your MMO's latest update?
I've been slowly working my way through a couple of Star Wars: The Old Republic class stories in recent weeks, and while I'll occasionally duo or pop into a Flashpoint PUG to close an XP gap, I haven't really been paying attention to what else is going on with the game. Case in point is this week's 2.8 update. I guess the main feature is the new stupid tax (a.k.a. gambling) along with increased rewards for Galactic Starfighter matches. Neither of these activities appeals to me in the slightest, so while I'm kinda pleased to see SWTOR getting any sort of update, this particular one rates somewhere between meh and huh-they-actually-spent-dev-time-on-that? What about you, Massively readers? Are you in tune with the latest updates in your MMO of choice, or are you doing your own thing? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Star Wars: The Old Republic launches update 2.8
Do you like to gamble? Do you like video games? Do you like to gamble in video games? If so, you'll be super happy with the latest event coming to Star Wars: The Old Republic today, giving players a chance to spin the wheel and win on Nar Shadda. Yes, that's sort of what you do when downing a boss and hoping for loot anyway, but this time it's with an actual slot machine, complete with themed gambling outfits as a reward. If you don't like gambling, though, there's still plenty of events coming in that will tickle your fancy, ranging from increased Galactic Starfighter awards to the next round of doubled experience. Players can also queue up for story-mode Operations without worry over the minimum item levels, allowing you to jump in and experience the content. It's plenty of events for anyone playing the game, and you can hop in and experience them now.
'Summer of SWTOR' plans updated
BioWare Senior Producer Bruce Maclean took to the forums today to give an updated plan for the "Summer of SWTOR" that's coming to an MMO near you and to a galaxy far, far away. The updated schedule for the next few months of the game are as follows: June 10th: Game Update 2.8 arrives with a playable Nar Shaddaa Casino, double PvP currency events, a double Starfighter currency event, an overhaul to groupfinder operations, a nightmare mode for Dread Palace, an update to the nightmare mode for Dread Fortress, two new starfighters, and various tweaks. June through August: BioWare will cycle through all of its major in-game events, one after another, between the launch of 2.8 and the arrival of 2.9. August 19th: Game Update 2.9, also known as the Galactic Strongholds expansion, will unlock for subscribers. This will include the Forged Alliances storyline. Maclean also teased that his team has "a lot of folks working on something very big for later this year that [he has] yet to give details on."
Twitch Plays Pokemon gambles with Pokemon Stadium 2
Gone are the days when Twitch Plays Pokemon was just a random crowd-play experiment based on a popular Game Boy RPG. Not only has the livestreamed game moved on to Pokemon Platinum for Nintendo DS, but it now features another game on the stream entirely: Pokemon Stadium 2 for Nintendo 64. Now, Twitch chatters can bet on battles between creatures in Pokemon Stadium 2, which act in completely random ways, all while participating in Twitch Plays Pokemon's ongoing quest to catch 'em all. The livestreamed game began in February with Pokemon Red, in which thousands of viewers were able to control the game using Twitch's embedded chat. The first game ended after two weeks, garnering 35 million viewers and countless memes and pieces of user-created lore. Now hovering around 2,500 concurrent viewers, Twitch Plays Pokemon is slowly approaching 60 million total viewers after having beaten four games in the Pokemon series. [Image: The Pokemon Company]
New bill would outlaw online gambling, heads to Congress this week
The US government may have opposed extensive net neutrality laws and regulation of ISPs in the past, but when it comes to online gambling, several politicians are calling for the ban hammer. If Senator Lindsey Graham and Rep. Jason Chaffetz have their way, it will soon be illegal to play slots on your smartphone. Today, the two introduced legislation to outlaw internet betting -- excluding fantasy sports and horse racing -- asserting that the activity is a potential national security threat, among other things. Gambling sites, co-sponsor Senator Dianne Feinstein claims, often don't screen for underage players. Supports of the legislation also cite the lack of oversight for criminal acts such as identity theft and money-laundering, and they naturally invoke gambling addiction as well. Notably, Las Vegas Sands titan Sheldon Adelson is supporting the bill.
Faif is a turn-based tile combat game rooted in gambling
Faif, an interesting puzzle game with RPG and gambling elements, was created by developer Beavl in 12 hours as part of the latest Ludum Dare game jam. The theme for this Ludum Dare was "you only get one." The premise of Faif is simple: You take on an AI opponent in turn-based combat. Each of you chooses five tiles from the grid and the game randomly chooses one of them for you. Land on a heart and your health increases, land on a skull and you take a hit. Swords increase your attack power and gems can be used in the store to buy goods. You can play a beta build of Faif in your browser right now, free of charge – we suggest doing that because the game is a lot of fun. An iOS port is in the works, while an early access version is half-off ($.99) on Android right now. Developer Beavl says it will upload improved versions of the game "almost every week" in the run-up to the full release.
Win some Gil and more in Final Fantasy XI's latest Mog Bonanza
Are you the gambling type? Does the chance of winning oodles of cash or special items in a lottery thrill and excite you? Then hold on to your helms -- Final Fantasy XI's Mog Bonanza has returned! Until January 23, 2014, at 3:00 a.m. EST, players can purchase Mog Bonanza marbles (up to 10 per character) and inscribe five numbers on each in hopes of winning various prizes, from Gil to a Kraken Club to a Chocobo suit. The cost of each marble is 1,111 Gil, and winning numbers will be announced February 13th at 3:00 a.m EST. For a complete run-down of the rules and a full list of possible prizes, visit the official site.
EVE Evolved: Should CCP interfere in the sandbox?
When it comes to player outrage, EVE Online seems to make the headlines more than any other MMO. The game has endured several high-profile scandals in its 10-year history, from the T20 developer corruption incident in 2007 to 2011's famous Monoclegate scandal. As EVE is a true sandbox game with a focus on PvP and player competition, developers have historically limited their direct influence on the universe. The importance of limiting interference became abundantly clear during the T20 incident when it was discovered that a developer had given tech 2 blueprints and preferential treatment to the Band of Brothers alliance. This interference in the sandbox had a profound and lasting impact on EVE's political endgame and undermined the legitimate accomplishments of other alliances. Some of the same issues that were raised in the wake of that scandal have now resurfaced amidst controversy over CCP's community team and its involvement with third-party fansites. Gambling website SOMER Blink was selected to host a huge giveaway event with rare prizes provided by CCP, and the contest organisers were then given rare battleships worth billions of ISK to keep as thank-you presents. In this week's EVE Evolved, I run down the details of the latest EVE Online controversy and ask whether CCP should directly interfere in the sandbox at all.
