The company will roll out two real-money versions of its casino and poker games in the next few days, marking the gaming giant’s first offerings in the online gambling space.

“Our whole mission is to be the platform of play,” Barry Cottle, Zynga’s chief revenue officer, said in an interview. “At heart, we’re a social gaming company. We view real-money gaming as a natural extension of that.”

The first two games to launch should be familiar; ZyngaPlusPoker and ZyngaPlusCasino are both in the spirit of Zynga’s most popular types of games. And it’s pretty logical that any foray into real-money gaming would focus on casino-style choices. We’ve known this was coming for some time, too, as the two sites’ landing pages have been up and waiting to launch for a little while.

This is the fruit of Zynga’s partnership with Bwin, a major operator in the United Kingdom which has licenses to operate online, real-money gaming websites in multiple countries across the U.K. Without that partnership, Zynga would have had to sort through a regulatory quagmire of securing licenses across countries. Fortunately for Zynga, Bwin already did all the work.

But I’d imagine this launch as a sort of testing period, if you will. For one, the two games are only launching on the Web and for desktop client download — not on Facebook, and not for mobile quite yet. Cottle said that’s Zynga’s way of seeing how the market reacts, and how Zynga should proceed from there.

“In the first versions of the launch, there’s a lot of things to get feedback on,” Cottle told AllThingsD. “Then over time you’ll be able to play different versions, with more elements added to the games.” The company does indeed plan to roll out the games to Facebook and mobile devices — just not right away.

It’s also likely testing in another, more regional way. As most U.S. users know, online gambling was outlawed widely in the states years ago. But New Jersey and Nevada are in the process of changing some of their laws to make online gambling legal. If things go well, it could pave the way for future U.S. states to change their laws to allow gambling as well. Zynga, in the meanwhile, can test and prepare its real-money games in markets where it’s already legal. I.e., the United Kingdom.

Don’t expect a sudden burst of revenue here. It’s still an early initiative, and won’t be widely available on multiple platforms until later in the year. But for now, we should see the first two gaming sites go live within the next few days.

Update 1:45 p.m. PST: And would you look at that, the street seems to like the news. Shares of Zynga were trading up around 5.5 percent at $3.24 in after-hours.

On Tuesday, Zynga appeased investors by beating its already lowered expectations for the period and exceeding analysts’ expectations.

It also showed critical progress on mobile, where one-quarter of the company’s monthly active users are now playing its games — that’s 72 million people out of 298 million monthly average users in total, making for a very large market across both Facebook and smartphones.

Just yesterday, there was some additional good news for the struggling games company.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie gave conditional support to in-state Internet gambling, a market that will benefit Zynga as it looks for potential new revenue sources.

To date, most of Zynga’s real-money gaming efforts have been focused in the U.K., where online gambling has been legal for a while. Zynga confirmed on Tuesday that it still plans to launch games there during the first half of the year. Additionally, it said its real-money games would also be available on Facebook in the U.K., where the social network has only conducted a few minor tests to date.

Zynga’s stock soared 11 percent today, or 34 cents, to $3.43 a share. The stock has not traded that high — at least consistently – since July. While today’s rise is encouraging, shares are still down more than 75 percent from a high of $15.91.

Other gambling stocks also jumped following the news out of New Jersey, including Caesars Entertainment, which saw its shares rise 38 percent, or $3.84 a share, to close at $13.91.

What’s particularly important to note about the measure that Christie has endorsed is that it would permit a kind of reciprocity with other states where online gambling is legal. Zynga has already begun the long process of getting licenses in Nevada, so conceivably it would not have to jump through as many hoops to begin operating in New Jersey. And reciprocity would be essential to making a big enough market.

While many investors are obviously thrilled about the prospects of online gambling, it’s hard to know how much revenue it will produce. Dennis Farrell, a gambling-industry analyst for Wells Fargo, told The Wall Street Journal that online gambling could generate between $650 million and $850 million in annual revenue for the industry in the near term, assuming around 5.8 million people gamble on the sites.

As evidence of the impending launch, two websites have already gone live in the U.K. to start spreading the word. One is dedicated to poker, and the other features a variety of casino games, like slots, bingo and roulette.

But during Zynga’s fourth-quarter conference call yesterday, the company disclosed a new piece of information: Its real-money casino efforts will not be limited to standalone websites. In fact, Zynga will also be leveraging the Facebook platform.

Zynga Chief Revenue Officer Barry Cottle confirmed to AllThingsD: “We’ve been working with Bwin to expand the platform to ultimately be able to offer real-money gaming across the Web, PC download, Facebook, and then hopefully mobile, as well.”

Enabling Zynga to conduct real-money gaming in the U.K. is significant for both parties.

Zynga is by far the largest game maker on the social network, and its poker game is the third-most-popular game on the platform. By allowing Zynga to take and pay out real money in the U.K., Facebook is opening the floodgates to gambling. Likewise, by being allowed to operate poker or other casino games on Facebook, Zynga will be able to tap into its existing network of players more easily than it could from a third-party site.

“Poker on a global basis is a very successful franchise, with 37 million [monthly active users],” Cottle said, although he did not know the specific number of players in the U.K.

This will not be Facebook’s first foray into real-money gaming in Britain, where online gambling is legal for adults over the age of 18. In August, it allowed Gamesys to launch bingo, marking the first and only game on the network, but now that seems like a very small test. At the time, Reuters reported that Facebook had no plans to offer gambling in any other countries or with any other partners.

But a Facebook spokeswoman confirmed yesterday that things have changed, and that more rollouts were coming: “Real-money gaming is a popular and well-regulated activity in the U.K., and we are allowing a few developers to offer games there to adult users on Facebook Platform in a safe and controlled manner.”

Online gambling continues to be unregulated in the U.S., except for in a small number of states, including Nevada. Zynga has begun the arduous process of getting licensed there, but it will likely take months, if not more than a year. Even if it gets approved, it will only be able to operate in that state, so it’s unlikely that Zynga or Facebook will roll out gambling in the U.S. anytime soon.

During Zynga’s conference call, the company confirmed that its two websites — ZyngaPlusPoker and ZyngaPlusCasino games — will launch by the end of June. The additional platforms, including PC download and Facebook, are also expected to launch during the first half of the year, but not necessarily at the same time.

As a reminder of why Zynga is getting into the real-money space, Cottle said, “It was in response to our players. We did some research, and a subset of our players were either already playing or wanted to play [real-money games], and trusted the Zynga brand. Given that we have the largest online poker game in the world, it seems natural to offer that as an extension.”

As most know, the San Francisco gaming company has struggled to find the right balance as consumer behavior has shifted from playing social games on Facebook to playing games on their phones.

In the third quarter, 60 million people played Zynga’s games on a daily basis, up 11 percent from the year-ago period. But those gains were only possible due to mobile offsetting declines on Facebook. The worry of Wall Street investors over the situation is apparent in the price of its stock, now at $2.66, which remains 72 percent below its initial public offering price at the end of 2011.

But Zynga management believes it knows how to turn things around, including expanding beyond its classic Ville-style titles, like FarmVille, to more genres that appeal to a wider audience, including casino and more hardcore titles.

In a story earlier today, I wrote about the three executives that CEO Mark Pincus has appointed to help turn things around. One of them is Steve Chiang, the company’s new president of games.

Here are some highlights from an interview I recently did with Chiang:

Tell me a little bit about your background.

Chiang: I got into computers early, when I was six or seven, and I was really into videogames and playing games on my computer. And then I got into programming. First, I got into the industry when I graduated from school as a programmer, by creating games for Super Nintendo. That’s when making a game included one programmer and two artists, or two programmers and five artists, so they were really small teams, so you really had to know all aspects of game development.

And then, in 1994, myself and some guys I went to high school with, and John Schappert, started Tiburon. We started making Super Nintendo games, and then we started working on Madden when the contract came up after the other company didn’t ship the game on time. It was the best-selling game on PlayStation that year, which led to the acquisition by [Electronic Arts].

I stopped programming in 1998 or 1999. When I left EA, I was overseeing all sports development for Peter Moore, who was heading up the sports label, and I headed up development across Vancouver and Orlando.

What was the attraction to Zynga?

Chiang: In 2009, when I was thinking of joining Zynga, we had FIFA Ultimate Team, which was a card-based microtransaction mode. It was a $10 mode you paid for, and then you had $1.50 card packs. We quickly saw the microtransaction part of it surpass the $10 for the mode. So you reduce the $10 to free to reduce the friction.

Microtransactions and free-to-play seemed like the future, for sure. The second aspect was time. Having an hour to sit down and play a game is not easy to come by when you have a family, so, as a person who loves games, the idea of playing games for five to 10 minutes with friends was really appealing. I saw myself reconnecting with people from high school, and I saw my parents playing with my kids. The only game my ex-wife will play is Words With Friends, except for SingStar, a karaoke game on PlayStation.

When you are creating a place where women, children and older parents are all playing, it’s an incredible feeling and experience. It’s like the first time I saw “Star Wars” in the movie theatre — that’s what we are creating for people. That’s what we are trying to create on a day-in and day-out basis.

I’ve spoken to people before about the initial draw of Zynga being that so many people end up playing your game, unlike a console title that has a limited audience.

Chiang: Absolutely, in entertainment, you want to make hits. When you are working on sports games year after year, it’s not super appealing. But the idea you get to work on a game played by millions of people? That’s great.

I mean, I always tell people, you spend the same amount of time on a game that gets canceled as one that is seen by millions of people.

Do you believe the definition of a social game is changing?

I do. It’s a moniker, like casual gaming. We label stuff, but essentially the business model is free-to-play, and gaming has always been social. I look at us as doing free-to-play games on multiplatform.

For a while, social equaled Facebook.

Yeah, that’s how I interpreted it, as well. But when you look at Words With Friends, that’s what a social game looks like, where you are interacting with a friend on a daily basis.

Zynga and Facebook just changed their contract language, which is less restrictive and will free you up to do more things, right?

Chiang: I think Facebook is a really valuable partner. We struck a new agreement, which enhances our partnership in some ways, and allows you to invest more in our platform and mobile.

Everyone talks about gaming as a hits-driven business. Is it possible to sustain that over the long term?

Chiang: I think we’ve seen companies like EA and Activision be able to sustain [that]. There’s aways peaks and valleys.

With social, it’s more about gaming as a service — it’s a TV model, if you will. We continue to put out new content every week, and on Facebook every single day. That keeps our players engaged. There’s games like Poker that have been around forever. There are certainly franchises. It’s not that different from a Call of Duty or a Madden Football, which has been going on for 15 years now. We have some of the same characteristics in Poker and Words With Friends.

Tell me about the story arc for Zynga’s Villes. How come some are not as successful as the ones in the past?

What we’ve seen is a few different things. We are seeing consumer tastes changing, and there’s a player movement toward mobile gaming. If you look at just a single platform, you’ll see a peak or a leveling-off of gaming on Facebook. But we are seeing growth on mobile. As we go multiplatform, we may have peaks and valleys on a single platform, but we’ll see overall growth.

That seems to be a platform issue, but is there something about Villes in particular that is no longer popular?

Chiang: When I look at FarmVille 2, it’s reengaging a lot of players, and is off to a great start. There’s an aspect of something new, and so players are saying, “Let’s try that.”

A game like Pokemon peaked at a $1 billion business, but over time, it’s still a big business and it has sustained. Traditionally, you’ll see a massive pop and then it will sustain. It’s a great business, and when we put out great content like FarmVille 2, our players respond and they engage.

Let’s go back to the cross-platform approach. Zynga is going after both Facebook and mobile, and has restructured its leadership team around that. How has your job changed?

Chiang: I took over all of the games business, so I have every game on mobile and Web, and just recently I reorganized around our players and genres.

We have some great leaders, and some of the most experienced in social gaming in the western world. We are going to run our “Invest and Express,” which are our Ville games. We have a new group in PVP (player versus player), which is focused on men 18 to 34.

Then we have our casino group, which is poker and male-skewing, and we have slots and bingo, which is focused on women. And then we have our mobile casual group, which is focused around some of our big franchises, like Draw Something and Words With Friends.

Some critics say that Zynga’s games are not fun. What do you say to that?

Chiang: I think when you look at a game like FarmVille 2 or Elite Slots, we are driving new innovation, and we are continuing to push innovation. At the same time, if we change too much, players complain. We saw it in sports games, and you see it in social gaming, you want a consistent feel and familiarity. You don’t want to redo everything.

Zynga is such a data-driven company, I’m curious what metrics do you look at every day, and which ones are most important?

Chiang: We look at the net promoter score, where we ask players to rate the game from one to 10. A nine to 10 is a promoter, and below a six is a detractor. We certainly look at overall how many people are playing and what our retention is, especially after launch, to check out retention after seven days to see which way it’s headed.

Why didn’t The Ville do well? Zynga announced it was cutting back on it as soon as it went live.

Chiang: I think with The Ville, the team made a great effort. But we did not deliver.

Our players didn’t respond to it as we would have expected. We hit a high DAU (daily active user), but they did not retain as well as some of our other games. We looked at all of that, and applied that to our future games. When you are going for hits, we’ll also have some failures.

Do you have a mantra, or a way to rally the troops right now that makes everyone believe you can create another hit? Something to inspire them? How do you manage the turnaround process?

For us, it’s about focus and getting back to basics. Our team across the board has delivered hits. We’ve had a number of great game makers who have been tied up with games, and now they are focused on new projects. We are reducing the number of games we are making, and focusing on a fewer with the highest potential in Invest and Express, player versus player and casino.

With many departures over the past few months, does Zynga still have the talent to make good games?

Chiang: Absolutely. We had a lot of people joining before the IPO, and some of those folks have opted out, but the bench is still really deep. We are also still attracting a lot of folks. Social is not for everyone, so some people came here to try something, but the future is really bright. We have a strong network of players on Facebook and mobile, and a number of great games in the pipeline that should be — and we’ll see how they do — but are going to be really fun and social.

Is there a message that you’d like to get out to people on Zynga’s game creation? Do you think there is an impression people have that you’d like to correct?

Chiang: I never thought about that. I firmly believe that we have a huge bright future and have the best position for talent, and in terms of our network and in terms of mobile and Facebook players to drive the biggest and best entertainment in the world. We are well-positioned that way, and hopefully you’ll see things in the future that will surprise and delight a lot of people.

According to a report by Envision IP, an intellectual property research firm, Zynga has grown its holdings from a single patent and nine pending a year ago to roughly 89 U.S. patents and 36 pending today.

A Zynga representative declined to comment.

A quick search on the U.S. patent site reveals that Zynga owns at least 50 patents for everything from “finding friends for multi-user online games” to “changing virtual items based on location-based actions” and “harvest mechanics for interactive social games.”

Envision Managing Director Maulin Shah explains that another 38 or so patents have been reassigned to Zynga by a company named Walker Digital. Of those, he said, 33 patents relate to casino gaming and gambling technologies.

The patents reassigned to Zynga range from technology that allows users to place wagers, to team play within a casino slot club, to making payouts based on predefined rules. Another five had to do with audio streaming.

Shah said a significant ramp-up in patent holdings can be normal, especially if a company is trying to expand into a new business line. “They probably found it prudent to get some patents before they entered the online gambling space,” he said.

To be sure, Zynga is serious about moving into real-money gaming from its core business of selling virtual goods on Facebook.

Last month, it launched two landing pages in the U.K. that will eventually become the home to 180 casino games, including slots, roulette and blackjack. Additionally, Zynga’s FarmVille brand is expected to be used for one of the slot games. It also began the arduous process of seeking a license in Nevada to conduct real-money gaming online. The process could take close to two years — in just one state.

The acquisition of licenses from Walker Digital is the most interesting part of this story.

In August, The Wall Street Journal reported that Walker Digital had filed about 30 lawsuits targeting hundreds of companies, including Amazon.com, Google and Zynga. Walker Digital, which is owned by Jay Walker, the founder of Priceline.com, is known for enforcing patents opportunistically (a.k.a. patent trolling).

Shah said on March 26 that the case was dismissed, just four days after Walker Digital reassigned the 33 patents to Zynga. However, the patent at issue in the lawsuit was not one of the ones reassigned.

It is completely unclear if those events are connected, or how much Zynga paid for the patents (if anything). But Zynga’s not talking. We also sent an email to Walker Digital, but did not hear back immediately. If we do, we’ll be sure to provide an update.

Zynga Plus Poker and Zynga Plus Casino are both viewable in the U.S., but once it goes live, players will have to be located in the U.K. and over the age of 18 to legally play.

Right now, the sites are being used primarily as a marketing tool to get the word out and to start collecting email addresses ahead of the official launch.

A Zynga spokeswoman declined to comment.

One thing that’s noticeable is how much social is being emphasized. The tag lines for the respective sites are “Casino For The People” and “Poker For The People.”

Today’s launch shows that Zynga is making at least some progress on its promise of expanding into online games where players can win and lose real money, from its core business of selling virtual goods on Facebook. Both sites say that the games will go live in early 2013, which lines up with what Zynga’s CEO Mark Pincus had previously promised.

In October, the San Francisco company announced an exclusive partnership with bwin.party, which enables it to launch a real-money gaming site in the U.K. The casino site is expected to launch with 180 games, including slots, roulette and blackjack. Additionally, Zynga’s FarmVille brand is expected to be used for one of the slot games.

For now, Zynga’s casino ambitions will have to be limited to markets where gambling has been legalized. It has filed an “Application for a Preliminary Finding of Suitability” in Nevada, but the process could take up to 18 months. If Zynga is found suitable, a license could take another two to three months. Even then, it still would only be allowed to operate online in one state.

During its last conference call, Zynga declined to say how much revenue the real-money gaming sites could generate, but based on the company’s current stock price, it seems investors are being cautious. Zynga’s shares fell 5 cents, or two percent, today to $2.33 a share.

Today, Zynga is announcing that it will soon launch its newest casino title, Elite Slots, on Facebook.

The game will be the company’s third title in the casino genre, following poker and bingo. It is critically important for Zynga to do well with this game, given that there is already a healthy audience that enjoys spinning the wheels for a chance to win virtual currency on Facebook.

Of course, this has nothing to do with Zynga’s plans to generate big money online through real-money gaming. Those efforts are still a year or more away, so in the meantime, getting a base of free-to-play players should help its prospects when the time comes to add real online gambling.

Over the past two years, the casino genre has been quietly racking up significant interest on Facebook.

Zynga has been phenomenally successful with its poker game, which attracts more than six million people a day on the social network, but other companies have dominated the broader casino sector, which includes games like bingo and slots.

In January, International Game Technology, which makes games found on casino floors, acquired Seattle-based Double Down Interactive for up to $500 million. Prior to the acquisition, AllThingsD reported Double Down was generating $140,000 a day in revenue at the end of 2011. Caesars Entertainment also entered the space when it purchased Playtika, an Israeli game company known for its Facebook title, Slotomania. And on mobile, Bash Gaming is on track to gross $55 million on its one bingo game this year.

While that may pale in comparison to the money that casinos make, it shows there’s an appetite for players to have the same experience online, even if there’s no chance at winning real money.

Zynga previously launched a slots game on mobile, but the one launching soon on Facebook will be completely different, with more game elements.

“There’s already a slots audience out there, but for people who don’t like slots, it’s normally not deep enough,” said Jesse Janosov, a general manager at Zynga.

To get a sense of how Zynga added depth to a game that doesn’t generally require much skill, I got a thorough demonstration of Elite Slots from Nathan Ratcliffe, the design director for the game, who works out of the company’s Austin studio.

Slots on Facebook are very similar to what you see in Las Vegas. You place your bet, choose the number of lines you want to play and then spin the wheels. Facebook games usually give players a number of free coins a day with the option of buying more.

In that regard, Zynga’s game is no different — it provides all of the basics that a slot player will be looking for. But it also offers a couple of side games, which players can either choose to participate in or ignore.

The game is played simultaneously with 150 people in a room who are not necessarily friends, but can chat and share goals. Together, the players rack up points to hit certain targets to fight a boss. In a fairyland setting, that might be a witch, but in a winter wonderland, it could be an abominable snowman. Players choose their avatars for the fight, anything from a white owl to a chihuahua or a cute bulldog.

Ratcliffe says the game will launch with six different themes, with all hand-drawn original artwork. The game also has 50 minutes of original music to replicate all the normal sounds heard on a casino floor.

While slots is all luck rather than skill, there is some strategy to this game. For instance, picking the bulldog over the chihuahua will allow you to progress faster to the goal, and the more you bet, the more you will win, which will give you more strength in fighting the boss. It’s important to note that “fighting” doesn’t entail any weapons or special game skill. It just requires players to continue spinning the wheels — each win results in an attack on the boss; the spins eventually take their toll and kill him.

Ratcliffe said the strategy elements were borrowed from Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, while the avatar components were copied directly from Zynga’s popular Ville games, where expression and collecting items is popular. It’s the combination of the two that they are hoping will attract a wide audience from the existing poker base to its Ville players to new players who are playing slots elsewhere.

Zynga’s Elite Slots is an important game launch for the company since players have grown tired of the mechanics of its other games. Plus, Janosov estimates that slots makes up 80 percent of the casino genre, so while Zynga has dominated poker, it still has a way to go in the other categories.

Zynga said it is forming an exclusive partnership with bwin.party, a real-money gaming operator. This marks the company’s first move into real-money from the funny-money gaming it’s used to hosting on Facebook, through games like Poker.

The poker and casino games site in the U.K. will use Zynga’s branding and will launch with 180 games that the two companies have developed, including slots, roulette and blackjack. The company’s FarmVille brand will also be present in the form of a slots game.

The companies expect to launch in the first half of 2013, which lines up with what Zynga’s CEO Mark Pincus has previously promised.

A year ago, Zynga started showing broad interest in casino games, and 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. In January, it confirmed it was looking for a partnership to get into real-money gaming.

Of course, it makes sense for Zynga to start off in international markets since online gambling laws are still being cleared in the U.S. Zynga’s service in the U.K. will operate under bwin.party’s Gibraltar gaming license.

AllThingsD has learned that Maytal Ginzburg is joining Zynga as the company’s chief operating officer in charge of new markets, according to her LinkedIn profile.

As recently as July, Ginzburg was the SVP of regulated markets at 888 Holdings, where she was responsible for acquiring customers and other operations.

888 Holdings operates an online portal at 888.com, offering real-money games such as poker, bingo and sports betting, in markets where online gambling is regulated. More recently, it started to investigate the opportunity in social and mobile gaming through the 2010 acquisition of Mytopia from Real Dice.

Ginzburg has not yet started to work at Zynga, but is expected to begin soon. Social Casino Intelligence was first to point out that she was hired by the company. A spokesman declined to comment.

The hire is important for the Facebook games maker because it shows that, while a number of executives have decided to leave, it can still recruit talent at a very high level.

During the company’s last earnings call, CEO Mark Pincus confirmed that Zynga’s first real-money products were in development, and that it believes it has a huge opportunity to leverage its strong casino presence on Facebook, including with Zynga Poker and newer properties, like Bingo and Slots. Pincus said he expects to launch Zynga’s first real-money gaming products in international markets in the first half of 2013, subject to licensing approvals.

At this time, it’s unclear what Ginzburg will be doing at Zynga, but from an interview she conducted with a U.K. publication, you can tell Zynga was very much on her radar.

She told Inside Poker Business that she believed it was important to integrate social features into 888’s existing products in order to make interactions less serious and more welcoming to casual players. One product that social features helped with was PokerCams, which allowed users to see who they were playing with online.

“We want to attract players who will play for casual entertainment, and we therefore needed to deliver social platforms that are easy to use yet provide all the interactive features users expect,” Ginzburg told Inside Poker Business, adding that “the biggest risk we were running was that casual players avoided the product because of a lack of interaction, which is why so many have gone to Zynga.”

Ray Bitar, 40 years old, is the most significant person yet to turn himself into the Justice Department’s 15-month-long effort to prosecute the three one-time leading online poker companies in the U.S. He pleaded not guilty in a hearing in Manhattan federal court Monday, and will be able to be out on bail after posting a $2.5 million bond, a judge ruled.

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“We have high aspirations and high hopes for this one,” said Jami Laes, VP of Global Studios for Playfish, EA’s social games studios.

As part of the company’s E3 press conference this afternoon, it is unveiling SimCity Social for Facebook, where players pretend to be the mayor of their very own city.

All Things D began live coverage about an hour ago, but you may be able to catch the tail end of the live stream on Spike TV.

Leave it to a game company to not give up after getting beat the first time it challenged Zynga on the Facebook platform.

As you may recall, last year EA used the annual videogame conference to announce The Sims Social, which it hoped would push the company to the top of the Facebook charts.

For a short period, the game indeed did spectacularly, attracting 30 million players a month soon after launching. At that level, it beat FarmVille, one of Zynga’s most popular games, and helped to make EA the second-largest developer on Facebook.

But a year later, the Sims Social doesn’t even register in the top 25 and EA has fallen to fourth place.

In general, EA believes it can leverage big brands, like the Sims, Monopoly and Scrabble, to catch up to Zynga on the Facebook platform. But so far, Zynga has been able to dominate the charts through established games like FarmVille, CityVille and Poker.

In an interview, EA’s John Riccitiello told All Things D that he wished the Sims Social had sustained longer, but promised that at today’s press conference EA would be making introductions that will make your “eyeballs peel.”

In addition to SimCity, it also will show off several other game announcements for the game consoles and PCs.

To be sure, EA’s SimCity brand is the undisputed leader in city-building simulators, making this launch pivotal to the company’s success.

As with other versions of the game, the Facebook edition challenges players to act as a virtual mayor, constructing roads, buildings and streets from the ground up to make a city. But unlike other versions of the game, players will get to collaborate with friends, deciding to either build a friendly relationship with another city or a rivalry.

For instance, Laes said, a player may go to dinner with a friend and will have the choice to make it a nice evening or to sabotage it by throwing up on the table; likewise, you can send a seagull attack to your friend’s city, unleashing poop bombs on the city’s rooftops.

“It’s suitable for the platform. It’s rewarding and fun and surprising,” said Laes, who was surprisingly stoic discussing such subjects as “poop” and “throw up.”

The social game will launch soon on an unspecified date. It also precedes the launch of the new SimCity for the PC, which is expected to hit stores in February 2013.

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The company, which specializes in developing card and casino games for Android and Facebook, said the investment will be used for building more games, expanding to other platforms — like Apple’s iOS — and possible acquisitions.

Dragonplay says it is best known for Live Holdem Poker Pro on Android, which has more than 12 million installs and two million monthly active players.

To date, the casino category has been very successful on social networks, with Zynga’s Poker game dominating at the top of the charts. More recently, the attention has been turning toward real-money gaming as restrictions begin to relax in the U.S.

Accel’s Adam Valkin, who is joining the company’s board, said the company is currently focused on free-to-play social gaming, but Dragonplay will pursue other opportunities as they emerge.

Zynga and other companies, such as Double Down Interactive, which was acquired by a video poker company, and Caesars Entertainment, which went public, have been among the most vocal about going after the opportunity.

Dragonplay, which was founded in 2010 by Sharon Tal, previously raised seed capital from Entrée Capital.

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.”