Analyst firm Wedbush Securities believes that there is still room for social games giant Zynga's share price to further appreciate, although it doesn't think the company's online gambling plans are as solid.

Although Zynga's stock price initially floundered, it improved following news that Facebook had filed for an initial public offering. In a new analysis report, Wedbush's Michael Pachter has now said that Zynga is in a good position to further improve its stock thanks to recent releases.

In particular, he noted that Zynga has hired a number of former EA executives, including EA mobile lead Barry Cottle, putting the company in the position to develop "compelling content" in the near future.

"[We] think that having true game people in charge of its operations will position it to execute well on its business plan," he added.

With this in mind, Pachter believes Zynga may well double its current revenues by 2013, with plenty of room for growth beyond that.

However, he does not think that Zynga's venture into the online gambling space will be as successful, given that there are plenty of other companies that already have gambling userbases and loyalty programs that will provide advantages over Zynga.

"We do believe that Zynga could leverage its large base of free-to-play poker players to drive traffic to gambling sites, and believe that there is a meaningful revenue opportunity; however, we don't think the opportunity is as large as many have estimated," he noted.

Source: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/40317/Pachter_True_game_people_will_lead_Zynga_to_further_success.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+GamasutraNews+%28Gamasutra+News%29

I only listen to true gaming industry analysts 

I played Zynga's Texas Holdem Poker Android app. I got to 50k in chips then it said I couldn't get more chips till I logged on with a Facebook account. Kind of hard to do when you deleted your Facebook account. Oh well, I guess I can just throw my fake chips around like I don't care.

What is funny is that I checked out highest grossing apps on Android market and their poker game is #1 I believe.  Talk about dumb asses that don't know how to play poker...  They have to spend real money just to have fake chips?  Hopefully they hold tournaments but I haven't seen that option on the Android app (unless you have to log on to Facebook account to see that option).

I was gonna ask what Zynga was, turns out it's a who.

I've never played a game on Facebook and have no plans to... pissed me off when The Casual Collective started requiring you to play through FB so I just went back to Newgrounds for my flash gaming.

nope the true gamer would lead nintendo to everlasting success sorry. patcher . . nintendo remains the only company that focuses on games alone . sony stopped after ps2 . microsoft always wanted a cheapened pc so ya . thats just how it is .

sure wii u will be more advance but it will still cater to pure gaming . no extra bells and whistles such as b luray player to distract the owner of its main purpose