Online Slots driving Zynga Growth

zynga-online-slotsZynga has had a rough past few years. But thanks to online slots, this quarter won’t end up as such a disaster for the social-gaming company.

Zynga reports that they’ll book between $150 million and $165 million before the quarter ends. This is still below the $172.3 million that Thomson Reuters forecast, however, it’s not as bad as things could have been. Much of this is because Zynga reported their highest-ever earnings through slots games and “Words with Friends.”

Morningstar reports that the amount of people playing games on Zynga daily dropped by 24%, while mobile users and daily web users fell 14% and 49% respectively.

CEO Mark Pincus blamed another down quarter on the lack of big game releases. However, he promises that this will change soon because the company plans to launch 10 new games in 2016.

Zynga took a $46.9 million loss last year, which was proceeded by a $45.1 million loss the previous year. And one of the biggest problems for the company remains that, unlike online casinos, they haven’t done a good job at penetrating the mobile market.

sheldon-adelson-facebookMany online gaming experts once predicted that companies like Zynga and Facebook would come to dominate the real-money gaming market. Las Vegas Sands owner Sheldon Adelson even predicted that social companies would squash both land-based and online casinos.

Obviously this hasn’t happened, though, because most Zynga/Facebook users aren’t as interested in real-money gaming. And in Zynga’s case, they simply need to concentrate on building their large base of social users once again. It appears that online slots are certainly helping them accomplish this goal as are some of their other offerings like Words with Friends.

However, it also looks like social companies are no threat to dethrone online casinos in the real-money gaming market any time soon.