Bwin.Party, the leading online gambling group, has announced that it intends moving into the social gaming market and will be investing an amount of $50 million over the following two years which will be used to enable it to develop its own games.
The gambling group has meanwhile paid Orneon and Velasco, two Eastern European games developers, in the region of $23 in order for it to secure hundreds of software contracts to assist the group in getting into the social gaming sphere.
A spokesperson for Bwin.Party said that the group is thrilled by the potential of this new market. He added that they expect the new investments to hit its 2012 earning by up to EURO 10 million.
BwinParty also intends using the funds in order to establish a new game studio called “Win”, the development and launch of an unspecified number of new social gaming games as well as other engineering resources.
Former Chief Executive Officer for Mytopia, Barak Rabinowitz, will lead the new game studio while Alex Usach, previously of Aricent Group and Flextronics International will lead the company’s new technology unit that will be dedicatied to the development of social games. Bwin.Party’s leading game producer will be Dan Matkowsi who was formerly game producer at Electronic Arts. Dennis Hettema, whose company developed Aces Hangout for Bwin.Party on Google will now be in charge of prototype development at BwinParty and Tili Kalisky who worked with social game companies at venture capital firm Greylock Partners, has been appointed as the company’s new head of publishing.
