Last week, Zynga confirmed to All Things D that it was actively investigating online gambling opportunities and is in talks with several partners.

The San Francisco social games company said Bingo is launching today in closed beta, and in the coming weeks will be available to everyone on Facebook. The game will become part of a larger franchise called Zynga Casino, which was announced in October.

Zynga’s version of the game is similar to the classic version found in bingo halls, where players watch for numbers as they pop up and mark them off on their scorecard. The first player to spell out B-I-N-G-O wins. In Zynga’s version of the game, players can compete against friends.

But for now, the closest the game gets to gambling is the casino theme.

Zynga dominates Facebook’s game chart today, but if it is able to get its toe in the door to online gambling — just as the laws change in the U.S. — it could be a big opportunity.

The casino genre has also been quietly racking up big numbers on Facebook for areas such as slots, card games and roulette. In particular, Zynga has been phenomenally successful with poker. Five years ago, it launched Texas HoldEm Poker, which continues to attract close to seven million users a day and is one of the company’s top three revenue-generating titles.

Zynga is not the only one investigating how to enter online gambling, potentially leveraging the popularity of social networks.

Video poker giant International Game Technology recently purchased Seattle-based Double Down Interactive for 500 million; Double Down develops games, including blackjack, slots, video poker and roulette. Caesars Entertainment also entered the space when it purchased Playtika, an Israeli game company known for its Facebook title, Slotomania.

Zynga’s Bingo game is not dissimilar to versions already on Facebook, such as BitRhymes’ Bingo Bash and Buffalo Studios’ Bingo Blitz.

The company has confirmed to All Things D that it is actively investigating several opportunities, and is in talks with several partners about gambling on the Internet.

A Zynga spokesperson provided this statement to AllThingsD:

“We build games and experiences that our players want and love. Zynga Poker is the world’s largest online poker game with more than 7 million people playing every day and over 30 million each month. We know from listening to our players that there’s an interest in the real money gambling market. We’re in active conversations with potential partners to better understand and explore this new opportunity.”

As with any new entrant in the space, Zynga will have to fulfill several requirements, meaning any major rollout is still months away.

The San Francisco-based social games maker will have to wade through a maze of state, national and international regulations. It will have to secure the correct licenses, and it also needs the right technology to make betting over the Internet secure.

For either of these last two requirements, a partnership or acquisition of an online gambling organization or other technology would make the most sense, instead of starting from scratch.

However, the effort could easily pay off.

Zynga was one of the first online gaming companies on Facebook, and continues to dominate the platform today. If it is able to get its toe in the door, just as the laws change in the U.S., it could be a leader yet again.

Back in October, Zynga first started showing broad interest in the casino category.

Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus announced at a press event that the company was going to launch Zynga Casino, which would serve as a single destination on Facebook to build off its strong brand in poker.

Its first new game, which has not launched yet, will be bingo.

Until now, the company’s efforts have been limited to building social and mobile games that are given away for free and monetized through the sale of virtual goods.

Getting users to make bets and part with real money could prove difficult, even for a company that has so many dedicated fans.

One thing Zynga has going for it is that social games are frequently compared to gambling because of their addictive nature — both lure consumers into spending a few more dollars to continue playing.

The casino genre has also been quietly racking up big numbers on Facebook.

Besides Zynga Poker, which is the most popular poker game on Facebook, and one of the company’s longest standing titles, there are many other sleeping giants. Sean Ryan, Facebook’s director of game partnerships, has even called them “unbelievable monsters.”

Said Ryan: “It turns out that people are completely okay winning virtual currency that they can never cash out.”

If players actually have the chance to win money, who knows the size of the opportunity?

A Facebook spokesperson said the company does not necessarily see a future for gambling on the social network. “We don’t have any plans to get into real-money gambling,” she said.

It’s unclear if that eliminates others from experimenting. In the meantime, it hasn’t stopped game makers from exploring the category or the concept.

Last week, Seattle-based Double Down Interactive, which was named by Facebook as one of the most popular game makers of 2011, was acquired by video poker giant International Game Technology for $500 million. It has 4.7 million monthly active users playing a variety of games, including blackjack, slots, video poker and roulette.

The deal closely followed Caesars Entertainment’s purchase of Playtika, an Israeli game company known for its Facebook title Slotomania. Caesars bought the company in two stages, the first of which was rumored to be purchased for up to $90 million.

Caesars, which filed to go public in November, declined to comment because it is currently in its quiet period.

However, some of its plans were revealed in a document filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission. It said its Caesars and World Series of Poker brands are dedicated to online gaming, and will take advantage of real-money gaming as it becomes legalized. Right now, Caesars Entertainment offers games “for fun” in jurisdictions where online gambling is not yet legal, but has identified the legalization of online poker in the U.S. as “the largest opportunity in online gaming in the near term.”

Still, the biggest hurdle is the law.

Internationally, several countries have permitted gambling for some time, and those areas represent the most immediate opportunities.

But there are signs of the U.S. beginning to open up, too. On the day before Christmas, the Department of Justice gave the online gambling community an early present, according to a blog post written by Nelson Rose, a professor and lawyer.

“President Barack Obama’s administration has just declared, perhaps unintentionally, that almost every form of intra-state Internet gambling is legal under federal law, and so may be games played interstate and even internationally,” Rose wrote.

Essentially, what the Justice Department did was to issue a new interpretation of the Wire Act of 1961. Under the new ruling, it interprets the act as only outlawing bets on sporting events — not all events and contests, according to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle.

With that clarification in place, it will now be up to every state to pass legislation outlining operating procedures. So far, Nevada and the District of Columbia have moved quickly to enact laws. To get other state laws passed could be a lengthy process, especially during an election year.

In the meantime, launching games only in Nevada and D.C. doesn’t represent the big opportunity everyone was hoping for.

To be competitive against Caesars and IGT, Zynga may have to partner or acquire companies that already have the licenses in place or the necessary expertise.

Some of the more obvious candidates include Bwin, which operates PartyGaming.com and is traded on the London Stock Exchange; Betfair, and other operators, like Bodog, Bet365 and 888.com. Many are based in the U.K. and handle a variety of casino games and sporting contests there.

The entrance into a new market, such as gambling, would take substantial resources, and Zynga has them thanks to its public offering. In December, it raised $1 billion, making it the largest Internet IPO since Google.

So, will Zynga be the next “unbelievable monster?” Clearly, it is willing to try.

In a nutshell, the department’s Office of Legal Counsel has determined that the Federal Wire Act, the 1961 law that had been interpreted to outlaw all forms of gambling across state lines, actually only applies to “a sporting event or contest.”

Well, what does this mean? It means that Internet poker isn’t barred by any federal statute.

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The four-year-old social games company revealed this morning that it is seeking to raise $850 million to $1.15 billion in its initial public offering.

In a presentation posted online, Pincus explains why Zynga’s approach to developing games such as FarmVille, CityVille, Poker, Empires & Allies and Words With Friends is a massive opportunity moving forward.

In the video, the executive, who can normally be found in jeans and a T-shirt, is wearing a suit jacket with a button-down shirt; he doesn’t bother with a tie.

From the 30-minute presentation, here are Pincus’s Top 5 reasons why investors should be excited about Zynga:

1. The idea of play is a core Internet activity and fastest-growing on mobile. Zynga is to play what Google is to search, Amazon is to shop and Facebook is to share.
2. Zynga is the leader in play.
3. The company’s platform can scale as it grows.
4. It’s a profitable business model.
5. Zynga has made an unmatched investment in the space.

Even though Pincus looks a little stiff, this is the topic he’s most comfortable discussing. Not to mention that this process should be somewhat familiar to the Wharton and Harvard Business School grad, who took his service- and support-automation software company Support.com public 11 years ago.

The company filed documents with the Securities & Exchange Commission this morning, indicating that it intends to raise between $850 million and $1.15 billion in its public offering.

At the high end of the range, that would translate to roughly $150 million more than it had previously estimated it could raise.

The company is seeking to sell 100 million shares at $8.50 to $10 a share and will reserve 15 million additional shares for extra demand. It expects to trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker ZNGA.

Under the best circumstances, the company will be valued at nearly $7 billion based on 699.3 million shares outstanding. That falls below some of the rumored expectations that have been floating around over the past few weeks.

Still, at that value, it will come close to the public valuation of Electronic Arts, which hovers around $7.8 billion, but falls short of other game publishers, like Activision, which has a value of  $14 billion.

Zynga has made its riches off selling virtual goods in social games on Facebook. Some of its most recognizable titles include FarmVille, CityVille, Poker and Words With Friends.

Virtual goods often allow players to continue to play the game and level-up faster, such as an energy boost. They also can be decorative in nature, like an outfit for an avatar or seeds to plant on a farm. Of the roughly 230 million monthly active users, very few players ever bother making a purchase.

Since the beginning, the company has a very close relationship with Facebook, which has been contentious at times, especially since the platform started collecting a 30 percent tax on all virtual goods sold. More recently, the company has tried to expand to other platforms, including the launch of several games on mobile and Google+. It also has its own online game network in production.

The company’s IPO will be one of the largest tech offerings in recent memory.

In early November, Groupon raised $700 million including overallotments. It had originally sought to raise $750 million. Other recent tech IPOs include Angie’s List, Pandora and LinkedIn.

But some critics think Zynga is rushing its offering before a broad financial collapse. If it waited until reporting fourth-quarter results, it could paint a stronger growth story as it completes the busy holiday period.

The San Francisco company, which was founded in 2007, was named after Founder and CEO Mark Pincus’s dog named Zinga.

In 2010, Zynga recorded a profit of $27.9 million on revenues of $597.5 million. In the first nine months of 2011, it broke even on revenues of $828.9 million.

While its revenues continue to grow, the number of daily active users that play its games has fallen two quarters in a row and some critics question whether the company can keep up its aggressive growth.

In recent weeks, Pincus has come under harsh criticism for his heavy-handed leadership approach. But to his credit, he has overseen rapid growth, including the acquisition of dozens of smaller game studios. Today, his company has 2,500 employees.

At the mid-range of its expectations, Zynga will bring home proceeds of $889.4 million after selling shareholders take their winnings.

The primary purpose of the sale is to increase its visibility in the marketplace and create a market for its stock. Proceeds will go towards working capital, but also $83.6 million will be spent to satisfy tax withholding obligations related to stock of current and former employees. Additionally, it plans to use a portion of the proceeds for charitable causes through its Zynga.org initiative.

As part of the sale, the company will have three classes of shares. Class A stock will have one vote per share; Class B stock will have seven votes; and Class C will have 70 votes.

Pincus owns some Class B shares, and all of the company’s Class C shares. Following the offering, he will control 36.2 percent of the company’s voting power.

As Kara Swisher previously reported Pincus will not sell any shares in the offering.

No other executives have plans to sell stock, either. But a number of the company’s early investors will sell stock, including Institutional Venture Partners, Union Square Ventures, Foundry Venture Capital and Avalon Ventures. Other interesting names that made the list include Google, which will sell 1.7 million shares.

The company’s largest institutional holder, venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which owns 11 percent of the shares, will not sell any of its stock in the offering either.

So what happens if you cut directly to the chase and build true casino games like slots, poker or bingo?

It turns out that rings up a pretty healthy business, too. The best part is that because of U.S. gambling laws, game players don’t ever get to cash out their winnings.

In other words, the house always wins.

In July, Sean Ryan, the director of game partnerships at Facebook, said the casino category is creating “unbelievable monsters,” and is still largely untapped by developers. “It turns out that people are completely okay winning virtual currency that they can never cash out,” he said.

But the category giant is no longer sleeping.

Earlier this year, Playtika, the developer behind popular Slotomania, was acquired by Caesars Entertainment Corp. for $80 million, and others are scrambling to keep up.

Today, Berlin-based Crowdpark has announced that it has raised $6 million in capital to help fuel its concept of social betting, where people can bet with friends on everything from who will win a football game to whether Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are getting married.

“This is just an entertainment product. You pay with Facebook Credits, so the players do know they don’t get any money back,” said Crowdpark’s co-founder and Chief Product Officer Ingo Hinterding. “It’s 100 percent legal.”

And there are many other players in the space, too.

Arguably, the first to establish the category was industry leader Zynga. In 2007, it launched Texas HoldEm Poker, a game that continues to attract close to 6.4 million users a day and is one of the company’s Top 3 revenue-generating titles. Two weeks ago, Zynga said it was expanding its casino games with an upcoming launch of Bingo.

Meanwhile, a number of lesser-known companies are literally hearing bells and whistles going off.

Seattle-based DoubleDown Casino, which has slots, video poker, blackjack and roulette in the same app, today launched a new game called Photo Booth Friends.

It falls under the “slots” category, which means you click to replicate the effect of pulling down the handle to see the reels spin on the screen. Photo Booth Friends lets you customize the reels with photos of your friends.

DoubleDown recently celebrated achieving one million daily active users, and has eclipsed other popular games like Zynga’s Mafia Wars, based on monthly active users.

Ryan name-dropped DoubleDown as one of the unbelievable monsters, and according to sources familiar with the company’s financials, we hear the game is now generating $140,000 a day in revenue. For reasons of competition reasons, the company declined to comment.

Others exploring the casino category include RealNetwork’s GameHouse and Electronic Arts through its recent acquisition of PopCap Games.

Here’s an infographic from Crowdpark, breaking down the social betting opportunity on Facebook:

Casino photo credit: FreeRishad.

The U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York filed a motion Tuesday to amend an earlier civil complaint to allege that Mr. Ferguson, Mr. Lederer and two other directors for the website, Full Tilt Poker, operated what the Justice Department says was a Ponzi scheme that allowed the company to pay out $444 million to themselves and other owners, which included other famous poker players.

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Regulators from the island of Alderney visited the Dublin offices of Pocket Kings Ltd., Full Tilt’s software arm, and advised employees there that the licenses for a series of affiliated companies in Alderney had been suspended. The regulators demanded that Pocket Kings stop providing software support, maintenance, marketing or other services to Full Tilt, said a person familiar with the situation.

The shutdown comes as Full Tilt is courting potential investors and lenders in an effort to raise funding to pay back online poker players it owes money, according to two people with knowledge of the situation.

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When it goes public, the Facebook game developer will be the first major U.S. company supported primarily by the sale of virtual goods to do so.

To get an idea of what such an animal might look like, I talked to a handful of accountants, lawyers and game companies to get a sense of what we might find under the hood.

What’s immediately clear is that there are no obvious answers.

The Securities and Exchange Commission and other governing bodies have not yet come up with a legally prescribed method for taking into account the sale of virtual goods.

That leaves companies to come up with their own best guesses.

“There are no rules about this stuff,” said Bob Komin, the CFO and COO at Linden Lab, which operates Second Life, the four-year-old online virtual world. “I haven’t heard anything about a standard, but it’s probably the number one thing we talk about before we get audited every year.”

Revenue recognition on the sale of virtual goods is not exactly a sexy topic (unless we’re talking about an avatar’s undergarments!). But as more companies shift to a free-to-play model, where games are monetized through microtransactions and virtual goods, the subject will become more commonplace.

Zynga may be the first out of the gate, but many others are waiting in the wings — Facebook being the most prominent. Zynga declined to comment for this story.

Here’s what is known about Zynga

Four of its titles dominate the most popular applications on Facebook: CityVille (No. 1); FarmVille (No. 2); its newest title, Empires & Allies (No. 3); and Zynga Poker (No. 4).

All of those games are free and monetized through the sale of virtual goods, such as purple cows, energy boosts, clothing or premium buildings.

In-game items like these are either purchased directly on Facebook or through gift cards purchased in the store. Zynga also makes money from advertising and mobile games, but revenues from those are presumed to be far less.

In total, Zynga reportedly generated about $400 million in profit last year on about $850 million in revenue, although subsequent sources told AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher that the filing will reveal much more robust numbers.

But it’s not the sheer magnitude of Zynga’s business that has created problems for bean-counters. It’s the details on how to account for every last penny.

In a white paper, accounting firm Ernst & Young writes that there are three typical models being used today.

Here’s how they break it down:

• Game-based model: The company recognizes revenue over the life of the game.
• User-based model: Revenue is recognized over the estimated life a user plays the game.
• Item-based: Revenue is recognized based on the implied or explicit life span of the item — in other words, how long it would last in the real world. Examples of more durable goods are virtual vehicles, furniture or weapons. Revenue from these would be recognized for as long as the player stays active in the game. Revenues from a more consumable item, like a virtual cup of coffee or a jolt of energy, would be recognized almost immediately.

And there are still other factors to take into consideration, such as whether the goods were paid for with virtual currency or real cash, and how much information a company has for establishing the averages.

Lack of rules won’t stop companies from filing to go public

It can get really confusing really fast.

Kirk Soderquist and J. Dax Hansen, attorneys at Perkins Coie in Seattle, are looking at the legal ramifications of virtual goods.

“You have a bunch of alternative financial services companies that have sprung up on the Internet around social networks and gaming because there’s a need to deal with money in an innovative way. But the laws aren’t clear on how they apply to the Internet and the gaming space,” Hansen said.

Despite the lack of clear regulations, they said, they don’t believe that’s keeping any companies from filing for a public offering.

The one major aspect for a company to consider is unclaimed property laws. If a user purchases credits or coins but doesn’t use them, a company can’t necessarily set an expiration date and count them as revenue. In many states, it is considered “unclaimed property” — like an unused gift card — and the government can collect the revenue.

“Investors and acquirers will be interested in how you deal with that,” Hansen said. “If they are dependent on breakage for their business model, then they have another think coming.”

Linden Lab recognizes revenue over three years

Linden Lab’s approach for Second Life most closely resembles user-based accounting, which recognizes revenue over the average lifespan of a player, which is three years.

That time frame was picked, Komin said, because players tend to stick around for two to four years. “So, three years is not a bad estimate,” he said.

Komin prefers the long timeline because it evens out the revenues, making the company look like it has a very predictable and recurring business model. “If you have recurring and repeatable revenues over three years, it means that even if you are growing really fast, your reported numbers would be growing less quickly, but it would be more predictable. The other far extreme would be to report everything in the current period, and you’d see the growth as it was happening — but it would be more volatile.”

In other words, if Zynga does the same thing and reports FarmVille revenues over more than the two-year period it has been popular and revenues from Poker over three-plus years, revenues will be very consistent and not reveal much in terms of how well its games are currently performing.

Likewise, sales won’t spike when they release a new title, like Empires & Allies — which has jumped from the seventh most popular game to the No. 3 spot in the past week, according to AppData.com.

The iPhone is an example of the two accounting models

A good example for this is how Apple originally accounted for its iPhone.

When the first iPhone came out, Apple used subscription-based rules to account for the revenue. That meant that sales from the iPhone were spread out over many months, rather than right after a customer bought the phone. Wall Street analysts found the practice annoying because the company’s revenues barely budged despite selling two million devices in one quarter.

Apple was forced to report it this way because it technically wasn’t selling a finished product. Over the life of the product, Apple planned to push down free updates to the device. (This is also why Apple once charged for iOS updates for the iPod touch, so it could recognize all revenue immediately.)

The laws have since changed.

“Apple is a great analogy,” Komin said. And just as Apple figured it out over time, “I think there will be some adjustment as people figure [virtual goods] out.”

To be sure, Komin has his preferences for how he wants to do it, as the company considers an IPO.

“Generally speaking, investors don’t reward you for volatility,” he said. “Recognizing revenue that matches [a user's] life cycle feels better than recording it immediately. But whichever way we go, and whichever we choose to do, we have to make sure investors understand the business.”

Whatever Zynga decides, investors (and journalists!) will thank it for being transparent.

And, it’s a lot like CityVille.

Empires & Allies is Zynga’s latest social game, which officially launches tomorrow.

As the dominant social games company over the past two years, this is Zynga’s biggest endeavor yet.

And the timing couldn’t be better.

After a five-month hiatus from releasing a new game, the drought is ending as the company gets closer to filing for an initial public offering.

The game is the first title produced by Zynga’s Los Angeles studio, developed by former Electronics Arts employee Amer Ajami. After less than a year in development, Ajami said the goal was to make the game more complex than before by adding combat, without sacrificing the appeal for a very large audience.

Walking that tightrope is why Zynga believes it has a massive opportunity in front of it.

It can’t just build games for “gamers” to be big. Rather, it wants to be the “play” of the Internet, much like Amazon is the “shop” of the Internet. At least that’s the way Zynga CEO Mark Pincus explains it.

Zynga’s initial games, such as Poker, Mafia Wars and FarmVille, filled that niche nicely.

Available to Facebook’s dominant audience, the games were enjoyed by a nontraditional demographic, comprised of mothers, females and children. It also could appeal to the hardcore gamer demographic, characterized as males between the ages of 18 and 34.

Much of the game will be familiar to players of other Zynga games, while some things will be new.

The general storyline: Players must rebuild a destroyed island nation by beefing up army units and recruiting friends to battle villains. The quest ends when the final villain is beaten.

Much like older titles, players must build huts, cottages and houses to collect rent to fund expanding empires. They also must collect resources to build battleships and other items.

What’s different is the combat element.

Players must create resources, like cannons and fighter planes and battleships, to fight villains. If you outlast a villain during battle, you win–but you can also lose.

Losing is entirely new. So is the ability to do evil. Instead of visiting a friend’s islands to do altruistic things–like helping collect rent–you can now also launch an invasion.

“The question of losing is a little new to a Zynga game, but if you track the progression of releases, you’ll note that with each successive release, they increase in complexity and depth,” Ajami said. “This is the natural successor to that line of progression.”

Even though it sounds a bit ominous, it’s all pretty harmless–much like how Wile E. Coyote is constantly risking his life to catch Road Runner. There’s a family-friendly feeling with bubbly and cute characters and bright colors.

“We didn’t set out to make a game that was dark and gloomy,” he said. “It provides mass appeal with characters that are fun to look at. Even though it has combat, it doesn’t have to be a niche audience or look a certain way. It has broad appeal.”

There’s also a component of strategy.

Similar to The Settlers of Catan, which is one of Pincus’ favorite games, players must have enough resources, like oil, in order to build ships and other materials. Players can either swap with friends in order to complete certain missions, or buy the resources with cash.

Zynga is not the only one recognizing that social games must evolve as players mature.

There are other companies focused on making even more hardcore social games. Just last week, Kabam raised $85 million in capital and Finland-based Supercell raised $12 million.

No doubt Empires & Allies will do well. With roughly 30 million people playing FarmVille and CityVille, Zynga has an impressive marketing machine that allows one game to feed another.

It also won’t hurt that it will be the largest international release for a game yet. Starting tomorrow, it will be available in a dozen languages, including English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Indonesian, Turkish and Traditional Chinese–and for the first time, Malay, Korean and Norwegian.

Ajami said despite the inclination to compare how well Empires & Allies does with CityVille, which hit 14 million players after 30 days, that’s not the goal.

“We don’t really target any of our previous games to beat them,” he said. “But we were really impressed with CityVille’s growth, and have high expectations of all our games.”

Just to be clear, while there’s an end to this game, it’s only the end of the first chapter–meaning this fairy tale could go on and on in perpetuity. “There’s not an end….We are already working on chapter two and beyond,” Ajami promised.

Zynga is poised to file for its initial public offering, according to sources close to the situation.

The filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission could come as early as this week, or next week at the latest.

The move is not entirely unexpected, given how well the recent IPOs of several Internet companies have done recently, including business networking site LinkedIn last week and Russian search giant Yandex today.

Their strong performances show the huge investor appetite for fast-growing and high-profile Web 2.0 firms. Wall Street is also prepping for eventual public offerings from social buying site Groupon and, the big fish, Facebook.

Zynga’s valuation in its last round of funding was $10 billion, but it is likely to price itself higher in an offering.

After all, LinkedIn now has a market valuation of $9 billion, double its pre-IPO price.

Whatever the price, a Zynga IPO is a major coup, especially given how quickly it has morphed into one of the most important forces in online gaming, largely via distribution on the Facebook platform.

The company claims that it has 250 million people actively playing its games every month. Its largest game currently is CityVille, which attracts 90 million monthly users, reports AppData. Its original Poker game still manages to attract 35 million monthly users.

Its early titles, such as FarmVille and Mafia Wars, first vaulted the San Francisco-based company into consumer prominence, and it has recently struck a number of high-profile branding deals with Lady Gaga and the makers of the upcoming animated movie “Kung Fu Panda 2,” among others.

That’s also meant a solid business. Zynga reportedly generated about $400 million in profit last year on about $850 million in revenue, although sources said the filing will reveal much more robust numbers.

The company has also grown its work force quickly. Last year, Zynga hired more than 800 people and today has more than 1,500 full-time employees in 13 offices, spanning six countries.

Recently, at the opening of its new Seattle office, its founder and CEO Mark Pincus–who has tried to hit the start-up jackpot many times before–said he had Amazon-sized ambitions for Zynga, referring to that city’s online retail giant.

Depending on how the offering goes, he might want to think bigger.

Sources said Goldman Sachs will be among the lead bankers in the Zynga offering.

Zynga declined to comment on its IPO plans.

So when will Zynga release its next ‘Ville?

In an interview, Mike Verdu, Zynga’s SVP of games, said it’s a question they’ve been grappling with for a while.

“We don’t want to overwhelm players, but four to five months is too long of a gap,” he said.

The pause in new game releases hints that the company is transitioning from a start-up that quickly produced a number of wildly successful hits into a worldwide game studio that must make popular titles a repeatable and predictable occurrence.

Obviously, though, there are extremely high expectations for Zynga’s next release.

Since Zynga was founded in January 2007, Facebook players have flooded to its games, including such titles as FarmVille, FrontierVille, Mafia Wars and its original game, Poker. In the first 30 days, FarmVille gained one million users, only to be completely outdone by CityVille, which attracted 14 million players in the same time frame.

By far, the San Francisco social game maker is the industry leader, with roughly 250 million monthly active users. Electronic Arts is a distant second, with 33 million monthly users, according to AppData, which tracks industry stats.

The pressure to produce another chart topper can also be felt by the stacks of cash piling up all around it. Zynga is rumored to be generating $850 million a year in revenue, and it recently raised close to $500 million in capital, according to documents it filed with the state of California.

It also is making plans for an IPO, which will add even more financial firepower to Zynga going forward.

A flop now would raise questions as to whether Zynga can continue its impressive run. It could also open up the door to a lot of companies eager to follow in its footsteps.

One of many challenges, of course, that Zynga faces is that the social games industry is evolving.

In the past couple of years, the game play has gotten more advanced and graphics have improved. Zynga can’t just produce another farm game, where you plant crops and come back to harvest them before they wither. Because of that, producing a title takes more time and money.

Verdu said the amount of investment has increased, but it is still in line with what’s reasonable. Most important to him is not releasing a title until it’s absolutely ready.

“The Zynga brand has come to mean something,” Verdu said. “City and Frontier have some of our best customers and they have raised the expectation for what a game is.”

He estimated that going forward the company will release a game at a rate of once a month to once every three months.

Verdu said Zynga is prepared to fulfill either pace: “We have enough products in the pipeline that we can fill whatever is the right cadence.”

Mark Skaggs, Zynga’s SVP of product development, compared making social games to the movie business.

“You can’t release eight great movies in June and then nothing for the rest of the year,” he said. “The pacing could be similar to a blockbuster pace or it could be different.”

The company’s headquarters are certainly bursting at the seams, as it prepared to move into its new digs later this summer.

Each room is decorated to reflect the various properties the developers are working on. The FarmVille studio has pink sheep cut-outs, baskets of fake produce lying around and blue artificial trees with colorful ornaments.

The Poker studio has a Las Vegas casino vibe, with the pillars decorated to look like giant stacks of poker chips.

In the past few months since CityVille launched, Zynga has flexed a lot of its development muscle on creating additional game play elements in older titles, such as FarmVille.

Today, for example, Zynga launched GagaVille, a farm decked out with Lady Gaga-inspired elements, such as crystals, unicorns and sheep on motorcycles. The farm will help promote new content from the pop artist, including songs from her “Born This Way” album, which will be released May 23. In March, Zynga also gave FarmVille a major face lift, when it released the English Countryside, which added updated elements to the game.

The only thing more unclear then the pace at which Zynga will launch new games is how long the games will continue to draw interest from players.

FarmVille continues to be the second-most popular application on Facebook, although in the past three months, it’s lost about four million users, AppData reports.

But, evergreen titles such as Poker continue to attract seven million users a day after two-plus years. Mafia Wars also has about two million daily users after two years.

“We don’t know yet,” Verdu said. ”FarmVille is on its second birthday and there’s still people who love that game.”

In February, Boomtown’s Kara Swisher reported that Zynga was raising $500 million, which would value the company at $10 billion.

Sources said the round included big institutional investors, such as Morgan Stanley, T. Rowe Price, Fidelity Investments and a smaller amount from existing venture investor Kleiner Perkins.

Today, Inside Social Games reports that the San Francisco-based games company, known for social games like Mafia Wars and Zynga Poker, filed a document with the State of California on April 14, showing that it has sold $490 million in Series C preferred Stock.

Occasionally, these documents are not a fair representation of the situation because they show intent rather than the completion of the round. They can also be out of date. A Zynga spokeswoman declined to comment.

Here’s the document from Inside Social Games:

Zynga April 2011

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan have alleged the poker companies, which are located outside the U.S., tried to sidestep U.S. laws prohibiting banks and credit-card issuers from processing gambling payments by disguising billions of dollars from U.S. gamblers as payments to nonexistent online merchants for golf balls, jewelry, flowers and other merchandise.

After U.S. banks and financial institutions began detecting and shut down bank accounts used by the scheme in late 2009, prosecutors allege, a new strategy was developed in which two online poker websites allegedly persuaded a few small, local banks facing financial difficulties to process their payments in return for multimillion-dollar investments in those banks.

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The new offices–still void of any computers, desks or chairs–were decked out with red ambient lighting, a DJ was spinning records and guests snacked on a mix of Seattle and San Francisco food. Sourdough and shrimp!

Pincus addressed the 200 or so attendees in front of an exposed brick wall typical of buildings found in the Pioneer Square neighborhood, and he did his best to woo potential engineers with the offer of a great company culture. He also took the liberty of comparing Zynga to one of Seattle’s biggest success stories: Amazon.com.

First was the employee pitch. Like Zynga’s other 1,500 employees in more than 13 offices worldwide, Seattle engineers and product managers will have a lot of autonomy in a corporate culture Pincus likened to a confederation of entrepreneurs who get to act as their own CEO.

Additionally, he compared the company’s ambitions to Amazon’s.

The analogy was easy to make given his proximity to the retail giant, but also because one of Amazon’s first VPs of engineering, Neil Roseman, will be the Zynga VP in charge of building the Seattle office.

However, it was mostly Zynga’s bigger goal that he was referring to.

“Amazon built shop….We want to build play. If we do our jobs right, playing games with your friends will be simple,” he said.

With popular Facebook titles such as FarmVille, CityVille, Zynga Poker and Mafia Wars, Pincus said, roughly 250 million people play Zynga games on a monthly basis. In all, they generate five terabytes of information a day, up from one terabyte a day five months ago. The number of social connections the players have made has soared to eight million from three million in the same time period.

In an interview after his general remarks, Pincus contended that talking about play instead of games changes the social stigma. “If you spent part of your day playing games, people might think you’ve wasted your time. But if you said you spent your day playing, people are envious,” he said, noting of the old saying, “It’s all work and no play. Not, all work and no games.”

The idea goes beyond Amazon’s association with shopping. Google has an association with search, Facebook with share, and YouTube with watch. “[Play is] one of the verbs I’d bet on,” he said.

So, how big is playing?

Pincus estimates that it’s massive.

There will be four billion devices that will be connected to each other through social networks, and half of them will engage in play. “We are very optimistic with where play will go in the future.”

However, as the industry matures, there’s a natural contradiction taking place. The simplicity of Zynga’s games made it easy for a wide audience to play (not just core gamers). But as those players develop and sharpen their gaming skills, Zynga and other social-game makers will be challenged to create more complex quests to keep them entertained. By introducing more difficulty, it will inherently narrow the company’s audience.

“Yes, that’s a challenge,” Pincus said. “But great games are Shakespearean. They should be all things, to all people.”

He argues that one game should be enjoyable for his niece, nephew and himself simultaneously. But that has been the challenge for the game industry. Companies end up catering to the audience that is the most vocal and spends the most money. That’s why the console game business trends toward hardcore gamers.

“It becomes harder and harder,” he said.

However, there are exceptions. Nintendo developed something that no one knew they needed or wanted, and, he said, Apple’s Steve Jobs constantly comes up with products people want, as opposed to giving them what they asked for.

“No one was screaming for the Wii,” he said, but now you see grandmothers Wii bowling with their granddaughters.

In fact, it is still the fourth most popular game on Facebook, according to AppData.com, and continues to attract nearly seven million daily users and 37 million monthly users.

Today, Zynga is acquiring the team from MarketZero, an Austin, Texas-based company that has established one of the largest online poker portals, which tracks players’ career statistics. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Zynga will not acquire the company’s main site, found at PokerTableRatings.com, but rather will be hiring the team behind the company. MarketZero’s founders include Gustavo Abdala, Amir Elaguizy, Nir Leibovich, Timothy Sullivan and Jason Wang. In all, Zynga will be hiring 16 people.

This is Zynga’s 11th acquisition in 11 months. More recently, the purchases have been less about technology and more about talent.

In March, Zynga conducted a very similar acquisition, which included hiring all six employees from Floodgate Entertainment, but did not technically acquire the Waltham, Mass.-based company.

Other recent acquisitions: XPD in Beijing, Challenge Games in Austin, Unoh Games in Tokyo, Conduit Labs in Boston, Dextrose in Frankfurt, Bonfire Studios in Dallas and Newtoy.