Zynga's patents with regards to real money gambling have grown enormously over the past year. Its portfolio of patents has grown from 1 and 9 pending to a staggering 89 US patents and 36 that are still pending. There is a great little search you can do on the US patent site and from that you can see that Zinga owns things like, "harvest mechanics for interactive Social Games", finding friends for multi-user online games" and "changing virtual items based on location-based actions". There is also the fact that 38 patent have been reassigned to Zynga from a company called Walker Digital and a large percentage of those are related to gambling technologies and casino gaming. It's also interesting that the patents from Walker involve using technology to allow users to place wagers and to make payouts based on pre-defined rules.
It is normal for a business that is moving from selling a virtual product on Facebook to entering the real money gambling arena, and acquiring these patents is a prudent move by Zynga before making the move. It has recently launched 2 landing oages in the UK which will eventually become home to over 180 casino and slots games and of course has applied for the license from Nevada. Zynga has been quiet with no comments at all being made regarding its patent growth and it will be interesting to find out exactly what the relationship with Walker Digital is who as a company have filed many lawsuits in the past, targeting huge companies such as Amazon and Google. Zynga appears to have lined everything up nicely for a move into the real money market and if its real money offerings become as popular as its social ones, then they shouldn't have a problem.
