In between trying to patent virtual currency, launching FarmVille on the iPad, buying a games studio and hiring a mobile head, Zynga also appears to be building out its presence in Europe. How to backup Zynga games? Blu-ray Creator Express is an excellent Blu-ray creator that helps you burn Blu-ray discs. It supports creating Blu-ray discs (BD-R, BD-RE, BD-25, BD-50) and AVCHD DVDs (DVD-5, DVD-9) from camcorder videos and various common videos.
We’ve discovered new job postings for Germany which indicates it’s pretty serious about the German asset it recently acquired in the form of Dextrose AG in Frankfurt. This is a well known tech firm which does what German tech firms often do very well, given their rich heritage in open source and hacker culture. Namely, push the boundaries. And to that end Dextrose has developed a commercial game engine for browser games which don’t require any plugins. Their “Aves Engine” game engine allows the development of 2D or 2.5D games with mere HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
Zynga is also advertising on ‘Germany’s LinkedIn’, Xing. We reached out and have confirmed the hiring spree with Zynga. Backup Zynga games with DVD Creator is a good DVD Creator software to create DVD from AVI WMV MPEG MOV FLV, etc Video files, burn DVD Movie with custom DVD Menu.
Aside from Dextrose, now re-named Zynga Germany, it also has an operational office in Dublin where low corporation tax typically attracts US firms on a European expansion drive. Zynga has lots of profit to play with and a war chest via Softbank Capital which recently increased by $150 million, so hiring is not going to be hard.
Given they’ve also bought XPD in Beijing, personally I’m wondering why they haven’t got Cmune in Beijing yet but I daresay that’s another story. AV VoizGame is a voice chat tool that changes your voice to various character voices, both male and female, for play in online games. The software is compatible with many chat clients, including Ventrilo, Teamspeak, etc., and games like WoW, MU, etc.
If we’re reading correctly, this patent filed in March is multiplayer gaming network Zynga’s application for the control of non-redeemable virtual currency and/or poker chips bought with real currency in virtual games, a.k.a US Patent Application #20100227675 for “Virtual Playing Chips in a Multiuser Online Game Network.”
While at first glance it seems like the patent’s strictures only pertain to poker chips, it explicitly references Zynga games Zynga Poker and Farmville in its “Examples of Embodiments” section, which delinates both “Non-Redeemable Virtual Currency” and “Non-Redeemable Virtual Poker Chips” as inventions that Zynga is claiming the rights to.
I am by no means a patent analyst, but tell me if this claim doesn’t read this way to you:
“A method, comprising:receiving, at a server, a purchase order for virtual currency from a player, wherein the purchase order was made with legal currency, and wherein the virtual currency is usable within the context of a computer-implemented game;crediting an account of the player with virtual currency, wherein the virtual currency is not redeemable for legal currency;receiving a second purchase order for a virtual object within the context of the computer-implemented game from the player, wherein the second purchase order was made with virtual currency; anddebiting the account of the player based on the second purchase order.”
So from what it looks like, Zynga is trying to patent the the ability to buy virtual currency that can’t be traded for actual currency or “what happens in virtual stays in virtual.”
And, like a virtual Federal Reserve, the patent reveals that the company plans to enact fraud prevention systems in order to prevent users from paying other users cash for virtual currency within its games.
If this is what it looks like on the surface, it’s huge, as it seems like Zynga is attempting to patent a system that a) already exists in its terms of service and b) it has already pressed charges on.
In any case, its a pretty ballsy move on Zynga’s part, as the virtual currency market is poised to hit 1.6 billion in revenue this year.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/22/zynga-virtual-currency/