Acer partners with Zynga, Pokki to offer specialized ‘game arcade’ on new PCs

By Russ Boswell June 25, 2013

Image used with permission by copyright holder

When you think Acer, you think gaming, right? Well, Acer’s hoping that’ll soon be the case thanks to its new partnership with two of the more prominent names in casual gaming, Pokki and Zynga. According to All Things D, Acer is giving birth to something called “Acer Games,” which acts like a games-only application store. New Acer PCs will contain a shortcut to the arcade, right on the desktop, or on the Start screen. The arcade will work like any other app store, but will focus only on gaming titles.

This is good news to dedicated casual gamers, as Pokki provides users with a unique app store experience that should create a more authentic gaming space. Pokki will use a specialized software for the Acer Arcade that will let people open apps on their PC just as they would on their phone or tablet. That way, users can receive push notifications about game challenges and updates.

Pokki is also packaging a variety of Zynga’s games into the proposed arcade. Pokki has done things with Zynga in the past, offering users “its version” of popular games like Zynga Poker, and Words With Friends. Although the Acer-based store will offer a wider variety of Zynga games, like Cityville, Farmville, and Matching With Friends, there will also be a slew of non-Zynga titles to hit the market, including, The Godfather, Dragons of Atlantis, Angry Birds, Plants vs. Zombies, and Cut the Rope. We may also see some Web-adapted releases morphed into app form, as well. Chester Ng, the co-founder of Pokki’s parent company SweetLabs, stated that it only takes a few days for a Web-based game to be transformed into an app, depending on what types of features the developers wish to have added (touchscreen support, notifications, etc.).

Unfortunately, there’s no word on whether this specialized store will be available to current Acer PCs in the near future. All we know is that the proposed plan is to include the Acer Games Arcade on newly developed Acer PCs to be released later on. Hopefully there will be some type of download or update that will give the “game arcade” to current Acer customers.

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Topics

Gaming
PC

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Russ Boswell is an aspiring video game and technology journalist from Colorado. He's been an avid gamer since he was old…

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