If you are looking for the chance to try something on your mobile, then you can take a break from playing at the online casino Planet 7 for a moment in order to take a look at the latest app which has been made available for download on iOS by Zynga. Entitled Slots: Riches of Olympus, it is based around many of the Greek gods and has Las Vegas style slot machine mechanics in order to appeal to those players who are looking for the chance to play a real style slot. This is part of the latest moves of the social game maker to keep up with the mobile platform, an industry which is rapidly evolving and perhaps leaving them behind somewhat.
They depend heavily upon their PC and Facebook-based games such as FarmVille, but recent poor results in that sector are causing them to look elsewhere, and recently they released a casino title called Hit it Rich for mobile. It is presently the top downloaded game on iPad in the casino category, so they are hoping to repeat that success with this latest game as much as possible. There has been a lot of reshuffling going on at the company recently, as they have changed their overall goals and tactics to focus on different areas of the market, a move which certainly was cause for concern for stockholders when it was announced. Now, however, they are fighting to get back on top and are certainly attempting to win back some points with the release of games such as this which have very high production values. “When I came in and looked at what we were doing … we decided that we needed to get back to focusing on quality,” the executive vice president of games at Zynga, Barry Cottle, told GamesBeat. “Quality in experiences and excellence in execution.”
The company is apparently planning to design games which both look and feel good, adding animations and special effects to make simple puzzle games a lot more interesting. Zynga is currently struggling a little bit in the mobile sector as the only popular titles which they have in that market are the casino titles and Words with Friends, so they will be wanting to capitalise on the casino angle as much as possible and push forward with better results. They recently acquired a gaming developer called NaturalMotion, who are the creators of CSR Racing for iOS and Android devices, and this shows a real commitment to launching the Las Vegas style games more and more often. This will give them access to an innovative simulation technology which gives a natural feel to the movements of the animations. This is very important to slot machine players, who are more and more getting used to seeing true 3-D animations as well as high production values such as those seen in Microgaming’s newly released Avalon II slot game. The technology will allow them to make the slot machine games seem more realistic.