GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 24 - April 2013

Q: I appreciate both of you taking the time out to talk to us. Let’s back up and start from the very beginning with a brief background of Amaya. What should people know about Amaya – its roots and foundations, and what direc- tion is Amaya heading in right now? JAQUES: That’s tough, as we are fresh- ly Amaya, seeing as we’re both former Ongame people. What it feels like the roots are about is bringing something to the online gaming world and doing it just a little bit differently than everybody else is – bringing something really quality to the market. I think where Amaya is going to be different is the convergence. It’s bringing land-based stuff together as well as online, through all the channels. Reaching out to customers across all chan- nels, including mobile, computers, land- based, etc. Amaya is a very young com- pany, relatively speaking, but is moving very fast and taking itself in a very exciting direction right now. Q: Let’s talk about Ongame, then, the poker side of things. Poker is an in- teresting sector of the online gaming industry, because to a certain degree, poker is poker. But on the other hand, there are things that you can do to really enhance the player experience, attract new players, make sure your players stay loyal and innovate within a game where it can be tough to be innovative. What is Amaya doing new with poker that people need to know about? KJELL: What we are primarily focusing on right now is to have a very good presence in mobile. We have had mobile products since 2005, and we have had real-money iPhone products out since December 2010, so we’ve always been focusing on mobile. But right now – and everybody is talking about it – mobile is going through the roof. We are continuing to innovate in mo- bile, and what we see as one of our big- gest innovations right now is a real-time achievements program, which we call Instant Rewards. Instant Rewards stimulates players in an- other way rather than just focusing on the money side, because we see that a lot of players are depositing money into the sys- tem, they’re not winning, and everybody would like to have the feeling of achieving something, to win something, to be good at something. With our achievement system that we have built into the client, we can give players some gratification based on what they actually do in the poker client. Q: This is a player loyalty program that isn’t built on how much money you win, but it’s built on achieving milestones, on achieving certain steps along the way? JAQUES: I would say it’s in addition to a loyalty program. Think about in a video game. The object of a video game is to go and beat the game completely. You don’t do that the first time you start up a new game. Let’s say it’s a first-person shooter game. The first time you have a rewarding feeling is when you complete the first mini- level, or you shoot that first guy. You get a quick win. You always get some kind of a quick win in the game. And for poker, for a casual player, which is our audience, that experience may never happen, or it may take a long time to hap- pen. By building in rewards, the rewards are what you make of them. You can al- most think of them as a leveling system, where the first reward could be received by playing five hands in your first session. As simple as that. You’ve played five hands, boom, you get a little reward. Wow, that feels great! I didn’t win a hand, but I won something anyway! To achieve the next reward you might have to do something more complicated, to the point where eventually you’ve got to win five hands with pocket aces on a Sunday between the hours of 7:00 and 9:00. You know, you’re always taking one level up to the next level. Q: It’s akin to what you see in the social games, where you’re unlocking things as you go along. JAQUES: Exactly. Nobody’s doing that. Nobody has the capability to do that like we do in real-money poker today. That’s why it’s a huge differentiator, and we’re really excited about it. KJELL: The other loyalty systems and bonus structures that are present in online poker today are post-play rewards. They say, “You need to play this much, you need to rake this amount and earn this number of loyalty points.” But we take that bonus and chop it up into smaller pieces during the lifetime of the player and hand out small rewards constantly, instead of saying that you need to play an infinite amount of hours to actually get something. I think a lot of players feel much more appreciated if they get something while they’re actually playing. Most players nev- er reach the targets they need to reach to get that bonus, so they feel cheated and they stop playing. It’s bad for the player, because they get a poor experience, and it’s bad for the sites, because they spend a lot of money attracting the player, and the player chooses to stop playing too quickly. Q: It sounds like it’s also better for at- tracting and keeping casual players. JAQUES: Absolutely. Most casual play- ers think, “I’ll never get into a decent level in that loyalty program, so that’s not all that attractive. That’s something that I just feel doesn’t apply to me.” The same thing with bonuses. It’s background noise. Not to mention that everybody has them. Everybody has a loyalty program. Everybody has refer-a-friend bonuses and all the standard signup bonuses. This be- comes a true differentiator, and something that’s perfectly aligned to our business model, which is to bring in casual players. Q: Bringing in the casual players is key to the poker ecosystem. If you lose the casual players, then you have a strug- gling ecosystem. KJELL: Absolutely, because the casual players are dominating the deposits and puttingmoneyintothesystems.Essentially, they pay to play and to be entertained. If we cannot give them that entertainment value, they will move on to something else. They are extremely important. If we look at Amaya in general right now, this is a technology we developed initially for poker, but we have implemented it in our new game office, which is the player management platform. We will roll it out on all the different verticals, so you will be able to have cross-vertical promotions and bonuses with this system. 26 Can mobile and social save online poker ?