month in minutes >
Q&A
Daniel Eskola
> Head of gaming > Unibet
eGaming Review (eGR): How important
is poker to a multi-vertical egaming
operator in 2014 and is its value
beginning to rise?
Daniel Eskola (DE): Poker is still an
important product to have in the
portfolio, despite poor performance in
the last few years for most multi-vertical
egaming operators. It is dangerous to
just look at how small poker revenues are
in comparison to sportsbook and casino
and make the assumption that it doesn’t
matter anymore. I would assume that
most operators find that a significant
part of their player base still enjoys
poker, it’s just that it doesn’t translate
into bottom line profit as it has in the
past.
Despite this change, poker still has an
outsized share of first product played and
poker players have longer lifetimes than
pure sportsbook or casino players. By
focusing on the experience of our more
casual players we aim to increase their
lifetimes further and, in the longer term,
to reverse the decline in revenue. It’s
important to remember why we all got
into poker in the first place – it can be a
very fun game.
eGR: How healthy is the future of poker
networks? Can they survive long term?
DE: There are major upsides to poker
networks or they would never have
done so well. By sharing liquidity and
centralising resources, companies can
enjoy an economy of scale that would
otherwise be unavailable to them.
Unfortunately, this comes at the cost
of drain to the network leading to lower
incentives for us to attract new players,
www.egrmagazine.com
and it leads to less control over the
direction of the network.
Unibet knew that abandoning this
model would be a high risk, but it allowed
us to truly concentrate on improving the
experience of our more casual players,
and to have full control over the features
we can offer. Our close relationship with
Relax Gaming will soon bear fruit in the
quality of our software and the speed with
which we can introduce new features.
eGR: How important is mobile to the
future of online poker?
DE: I think we can all see indications
of where mobile revenue is going for
sportsbook and casino. Poker hasn’t
followed that trend as closely due to most
operators not having a sufficiently good
mobile product.
Unibet’s poker will focus more on
tablets for now as our belief is they are
more suitable for displaying the amount
of information that poker requires.
eGR: To what extent will social features
drive future growth within poker?
DE: We can use ideas from gamification
and social features to make poker more
fun, but I go back to the point from earlier
– that poker is already a fun game. The
last few years have squeezed a bit of
the fun out of it with HUDs, auto-seating
scripts, players sitting out as soon as
the new guy loses his deposit and chat
box harassment. We aim to remind our
older players what it was they used to
love about the game and encourage our
more recent players to stick around and
discover what made poker so big in the
first place.
5
CONSEQUENCES
OF A LAUNCH
Bwin.party is preparing to launch its
RMG social sports betting app on
Facebook, but can it succeed
1
Sportster bet
and win is
nearing an initial
beta-launch
ahead of a full
launch planned
before the end
of Q1
2
Bwin.party
first revealed
the title to be
in testing with
Facebook in July
last year and had
originally planned
to launch the
product before
the end of 2013
3
The app
has been
developed
as part of a
collaboration
between Serbiabased Top
Eleven developer
Nordeus
and Win, a
Ukraine-based
development
studio bwin.party
invested €40m
into in 2012
4
Bwin.party
will join a list
of operators
including
Gamesys, 888
and Bonza
Gaming which
all have RMG
products on
Facebook
5
The Sportster
release )