ONLINE GAMING meets ONLINE GAMBLING

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This article was published 23/01/2011 (5381 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTAWA — Gambling has come to the video-game console in your living room.

Toronto’s Virgin Gaming, a division of Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin empire, announced this past week it had signed a deal with Electronic Arts (EA) to support a majority of popular sports games, including the wildly popular Madden NFL 11 and FIFA 11, using its online wagering system.

The announcement affects everyone from government regulators, who are trying to decide how to best control the expansion of Internet-based gambling, to parents who must now keep an even closer watch over their children’s video-game sessions.

Virgin allows video gamers to wager on the outcome of their video-game challenges and then tracks the players as they play on an Xbox 360 or PS3, ensuring no one is cheating. The winner is then handed the payout. Prizes can be in the tens of thousands of dollars.

The company said it already has 170,000 users from 30 countries signed up to use its online services.

So far, the Virgin system only allows organized tournaments, sort of like online poker tournaments — meaning players can buy into a tournament and then play their way through it, with the champion claiming the jackpot.

Sponsored tournaments, including a recent Maxim magazine event, would see gamers skip paying the entrance fee. However, in the coming weeks, Virgin plans to open up a game-by-game wagering system, which will allow gamers to create their own tournaments and challenge others online for real cash prizes.

“This is the biggest deal that we’ve had,” said William Levy, president of Virgin Gaming.

“We have the entry fee-based tournaments. We also have sponsored tournaments. Let’s say there was a $10 entry-fee tournament, you could click ‘enter now,’ agree to the terms and conditions and then we deduct the $10 from your account and put it toward the pot.”

To begin wagering on Virgin’s tournament-play system, a player must sign up for an account at the company’s website. Registering requires a credit card.

While a handful of game tournaments have already been offered on the Virgin system, including Halo: Reach and NBA 2K11, the addition of EA is set to greatly boost the profile of the service and open Virgin’s wagering system to fans of sports betting.

It will also allow the company to begin offering new services, such as Madden NFL 11 Red Zone, which will be introduced in the coming weeks and will allow gamers to create tournaments whenever they choose.

“We are going to be releasing user-generated tournaments within the next month or so,” said Levy.

Sports video games represent big business.

EA’s Madden NFL franchise is the bestselling sports video game in the United States, having sold more than 1.81 million copies in its first month on store shelves in August. According to EA, fans of the title have played more than 190 million games of virtual football over the Internet on Xbox Live since the title launched in August.

Nina Littman-Sharp, manager of the problem-gambling service at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, said the Virgin Gaming service should send up a number of red flags.

Littman-Sharp said while small, infrequent wagers can be a fun way to pass the time, large wagers on a regular basis add up to a problem.

She said addiction counsellors are already helping to treat problem gamblers and they are also working to treat people hooked on video games. Combining the two creates a new problem, she said.

“It’s bridging the gap between online gaming and online gambling,” she said. “We already see people who have problems with both. I can already see this being one more element that we are going to start to be seeing in treatment.”

Virgin’s Levy said the company has created a number of safeguards to ensure underage players are barred from wagering and problem gambling is flagged.

— Postmedia News