casino game development
There are several sites that offer a secure money transaction service like http://www.mollie.com and I would strongly discourage to do this yourself. I guess you can do a transaction immediately after a game is played but this is rather inconvenient since the it's likely the player has to pay for a game as well. Imho, you should have credits linked to his account and let him choose when to deposit and withdraw. This way:
- you safe money, since money transactions from and to bank accounts costs money.
- You can immediately debet from the players account on your server and start the game.
- If you have a lot of players you can earn a pretty nice chunck of interest.
- Players do not need to constantly pay for each match.
Side note: I sense that you are very inexperienced with this. Keep in mind you are working with real money, even by using a service like Mollie you should secure your own server extremely well. If you don't have a clue about security I suggest you work on that first.
I think you should stop working on this idea.
When you're dealing with other people's money like this, this definitely seems like a place where "if you have to ask, you aren't ready", especially considering the stuff you're asking for seems like the wrong kind of questions. Selecting a winner (manually? This should be done by the code/application) is super-trivial compared to everything related to security.
You need to hire a lawyer that is familiar with the gambling laws for each country that your game is accessible from, or you could end up in prison.
As mentioned, gambling with real money is heavily regulated across the globe.
Assuming the super-secret moderator tools showing your IP address are correct, (which your user name tends to support) I would completely stop the project.
If that country is correct, natives of the country are not allowed to gamble within the country but you can provide gambling support to foreigners. People of the country are allowed to go to foreign web sites offering gambling and the nation doesn't seem to care beyond taxing the money as it transfers. The penalty for allowing natives to play (particularly natives of the nation's primary religion) is a severe prison stay.
If that country is incorrect you still need to be careful and get lawyers involved. Regulations are strict. They are there both to support government interests in tracking money and ensuring taxes are paid, and also to ensure patron interest that games are fair. Since gambling tends to attract criminals they'll probably also require much reporting and accounting, and more.
Not only do you have your own country to worry about, you get to worry about other nations. Global extradition orders allow governments around the world to arrest people internationally for financial crimes, and you may be picked up by another nation's police.
Globally the biggest concerns are the easy ability to launder money and the ease of tax evasion. Money laundering tends to attract organized crime as well as petty criminals. Cheaters and frauds will also be a problem, but they're not the ones governments are most concerned about. It is generally easy for a criminal to convert "dirty" money from crimes, such as money from stolen credit cards and fraud, and make it difficult/impossible to trace. Often because the money is "dirty" from criminal sources the people don't care if they lose money in the process. If they stole $1,000,000 and the gambling system reduces it to $900,000, they've still stolen a large sum that is now considered clean gambling winnings.
Government police around the world can (and will) cross international borders to take down sites used by money launderers and can put the site's owners in prison for enabling criminals.
Real money gambling is a dangerous and expensive world to enter. It requires investing in skilled lawyers in financial law and gambling law.
As mentioned, gambling with real money is heavily regulated across the globe.
Assuming the super-secret moderator tools showing your IP address are correct, (which your user name tends to support) I would completely stop the project.
If that country is correct, natives of the country are not allowed to gamble within the country but you can provide gambling support to foreigners. People of the country are allowed to go to foreign web sites offering gambling and the nation doesn't seem to care beyond taxing the money as it transfers. The penalty for allowing natives to play (particularly natives of the nation's primary religion) is a severe prison stay.
If that country is incorrect you still need to be careful and get lawyers involved. Regulations are strict. They are there both to support government interests in tracking money and ensuring taxes are paid, and also to ensure patron interest that games are fair. Since gambling tends to attract criminals they'll probably also require much reporting and accounting, and more.
Not only do you have your own country to worry about, you get to worry about other nations. Global extradition orders allow governments around the world to arrest people internationally for financial crimes, and you may be picked up by another nation's police.
Globally the biggest concerns are the easy ability to launder money and the ease of tax evasion. Money laundering tends to attract organized crime as well as petty criminals. Cheaters and frauds will also be a problem, but they're not the ones governments are most concerned about. It is generally easy for a criminal to convert "dirty" money from crimes, such as money from stolen credit cards and fraud, and make it difficult/impossible to trace. Often because the money is "dirty" from criminal sources the people don't care if they lose money in the process. If they stole $1,000,000 and the gambling system reduces it to $900,000, they've still stolen a large sum that is now considered clean gambling winnings.
Government police around the world can (and will) cross international borders to take down sites used by money launderers and can put the site's owners in prison for enabling criminals.
Real money gambling is a dangerous and expensive world to enter. It requires investing in skilled lawyers in financial law and gambling law.
Thanks for this insight! Yet there are thousands of popular microtransaction games where there is gambling involved, but instead of real money winning you can win virtual money or objects. How is this different then a regular gambling site globally?
Thanks for this insight! Yet there are thousands of popular microtransaction games where there is gambling involved, but instead of real money winning you can win virtual money or objects. How is this different then a regular gambling site globally?
When I worked in gambling software, we called that category of games "Amusement With Prizes". These AWP games are typically structured to completely avoid gambling laws - usually the lack of money as a prize is enough to do that.
You know the "claw machine" at the mall, or the other modern cabinets like "stacker"? Yeah, they're completely and utterly rigged. There's no laws that govern them, so internally they're not fair at all. For example, they'll often have a counter that increments with each play. If the counter is, say, 10, then the claw will work and you have a chance at winning (and then the counter resets to zero). The rest of the time, the machine will sabotage the claw so that it drops whatever you pick up. The owner of the machine can set that number to whatever they like, so that e.g. they know that only every tenth game can possibly win a prize...
In some ways, AWP can be worse than real gambling games (and our gambling products were evil) :o
At least our actual gambling cabinets used real random numbers (not even pseudo-random - actual radioactive decay random!), were tamper proof, and only ran from government inspected EEPROMs locked inside an alarmed and tamper proof case with dual keys (one possessed by government, one by the machine owner).
instead of real money winning you can win virtual money or objects. How is this different then a regular gambling site globally?
I mentioned that in my earlier post. Quoting myself:
Globally the biggest concerns are the easy ability to launder money and the ease of tax evasion. Money laundering tends to attract organized crime as well as petty criminals. ... It is generally easy for a criminal to convert "dirty" money from crimes, such as money from stolen credit cards and fraud, and make it difficult/impossible to trace.
Gambling with real money and getting real money back out of the system is incredibly easy to abuse. That is by far the biggest reason for regulations.
Cheating and unfair advantage are minor concerns to government. Some governments will pass laws to help ensure the game is fair or meets specific requirements of house advantage, but that's small potatoes compared to money laundering.
Awarding virtual objects or non-money small-value prizes avoid the problems. If someone can win a $5 or even $500 prize from a small pool that isn't a big thing. If someone can launder millions of dollars through a system of money and tokens changing hands at an online casino, that is a problem.
