Who wins?

It’s clear that Party wants its casino members trying out poker, it wants its poker players trying out casino games, and I suppose it will want its bingo players to try out both. Soon you’ll have an account at Party, and you’ll be able to use that money from one account, to play any available PartyGaming offering. This, to me, is Party’s reaction to the market slowdown. But is it the right one, and is this the right time?

Common marketing perception, as I understand it, is that the best time to start rolling out your new product, or your updated product, is sometime after the rate of growth of your old product starts slowing, but before the growth stops altogether and the market starts to decline. In a sense, Party has followed that wisdom. While the Poker market is still growing, it has very intentionally dealt itself (crap pun almost un-noticed) a small flesh-wound, but as the black knight would say – tis but a scratch. Party Poker looks slightly less appealing than it did last week, but it’s still big – let’s not forget that. There are currently 52000 players logged on as I write, which is not bad going, so even standing alone Party is ahead of PokerStars, it’s only really true rival in terms of size. (In terms of class, they couldn’t be further apart, but that’s for another article)

It seems to me that Party wins nicely out of the new arrangement. Being aligned with other PartyGaming products has to be a better long term strategy than being aligned with a bunch of skins you share nothing beyond a common client interface with, given the size of Party’s player base in proportion to that of the other skins. Party Poker is big enough to lose those skins without worrying too much about it. Because Party has never really been about attracting the high rollers or the most committed pro players, or the biggest names, its users are primarily made up of the great unclean masses of the poker market. They’ll carry on playing like not much has happened, and plenty of them won’t particularly notice the recent, and presumably future, shift in the incentives offered to play there. New players will partly come from the casino side, so they’ll be used to casino bonuses, but if they’re new to poker, and fancy giving it a shot, they’re more likely to play at Party the closer Party aligns its franchises, and the more it aligns its bonuses, come to think of it. Don’t be surprised to see bonuses offered across and valid for each PartyGaming platform – which is an interesting thought I’ve had in the last 30 seconds, so if it’s daft, I apologise.

Empire and the other skins look like the biggest potential losers out of this. Until this weekend I could log in to Empire and play against 70,000 players. It was just like logging in at Party. Now, there are only 8,000 players to play against. Still not a tiny number, and comfortably into the mid-range of site sizes, but right now, what was Empire’s strongest suit until the weekend now looks like it’s weakest point. Part of the success of the Party network as a whole, I always thought, was the closeness of the sites in terms of look and feel, and how they operated. Almost everything between Party and Empire, for instance was the same, except Party was dark red to Empire’s blue. But now I can only see that harming Empire. Why would I sign up for, and play at a site with 8000 players online when just next to it is an almost identical site offering nearly ten times as many games? In the business lingo, I believe this is referred to as “player liquidity”.

Empire and the other skins need to find their niche, and quickly. In Empire’s case this is particularly pressing if they want to keep the share price respectable. At the moment, Empire’s direction has been to offer a reload bonus to keep existing players happy and playing there for the next couple of weeks, and as a follow up, they will be offering a larger bonus, the details of which have not yet been released. My guess is that it will take a couple of months for the average player to clear, and will effectively act as a temporary rakeback deal. By doing this, Empire can keep a fairly guaranteed size of player-base happy for a couple of months, which they will be hoping will act as an incentive for new recruits. They absolutely have to show that people still want to play at their site, and not at Party.

But I think they need to do a lot more than this. Party won’t be blind to anything that Empire does, or is thinking of doing, and can and will respond aggressively. What I think the rest of the skins need to do is start moving away from Party as much as possible. They need to collectively show how different they are from Party. The most dramatic way of showing this would be to ditch the current software, and start running on a new platform. And what do you know, by lucky co-incidence, Empire has just the thing already lined up and pre-packaged. In August, Empire Online purchased Noble Poker for around $40 million. Empire is expected to re-launch Noble Poker at some point in the next few months, and it will be interesting to see how this plays out. I don’t know whether it would be possible, but if Empire could launch Noble on a new platform, move itself to that platform, and take the other skins with it, then the future could be rosy. Given that with the purchase of Noble Poker came casino operator Club Dice, I can see Empire at some point operating a PartyGaming like suite of operations, which if anything would leave it stronger than it has been until now, given that before the purchase of Noble, Empire pretty much did nothing except sign up players and send them off to Party in return for a sort of finders fee.

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Tags: Poker, Party Poker, Empire Poker