No love for Zynga here; the bulk of my rent for the past reasonable stretch of time has been paid for by a Zynga competitor, and a lot of office time has been s

No love for Zynga here; the bulk of my rent for the past reasonable stretch of time has been paid for by a Zynga competitor, and a lot of office time has been spent ripping on them for their various tactics. There are many things to hate Zynga for, especially if you've actually talked to people that work there (or that have jumped ship, or they've tried to recruit). But I really don't buy the idea that gamblers are the target market. I know that demo very well, as my previous life was spent running numbers for an online gambling company (my experience with market analysis in that context got me most of my recent work), and I've always been a bit of a poker junkie myself. The Facebook crowd is far more casual, far more female, and far less into tangible, liquid rewards than the gambling crowd. Mistaking the motivations of this crowd is a serious mistake, and if you are under the assumption that the Facebook gaming crowd is made up of Pokerstars castoffs, for the sake of your business I strongly encourage you to reevaluate the situation. While there may be surface similarities in the addictive natures of these games, the people that spend money on gambling are almost always looking for real life gains; this stands in strong opposition to the typical motivation of a Facebook gamer, who is in it for the fantasy alone. I'm not saying that Facebook would not make a great market for real life gamblers, but at the moment, it's not feasible because they don't allow actual gambling. And the real gamblers know the difference - they won't even play on fake money poker sites, for the most part, even the ones that are quite badly addicted to poker. I seriously doubt that they're the same people that sink money into Facebook games to buy virtual goods that let them decorate their farms or give their avatars new haircuts...