GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 24 - April 2013

They’re used to communicating another way. That’s also stimulating the growth. But if we look at the game-specific parame- ters, I think the games have gotten so much better. Game developers such as ourselves – we are adapting a lot to the actual plat- form. Previously, a lot of developers just took the game they had, the online game, jammed it into mobile, and they didn’t change anything. JAQUES: Some of our competitors still do that. That’s the easiest thing to do is to take your normal poker experience andput it onto the phone, which doesn’t work here. KJELL: We have implemented small, nice features, such as you can just tap your screen if you want to check, for instance, just like you do when you play. Q:You’ve tweaked the interface to make it work for the mobile. KJELL: Exactly. You need to do that to be successful. JAQUES: It’s actually an entirely unique interface. It’s not the same at all as what you download. Our experience for the com- puter, whether it’sWeb or downloadable, is designed exactly for that. This experience is designed for this. The two are separate. They share liquidity, they share the player base, and all the tournament schedules and cash games. But in terms of user interface, it should be different. Q:You’ve done what a lot of media com- panies have done, where they’ve opti- mized their product for the particular tablet or phone. KJELL: Exactly. For instance, if you play on a mobile device and you want to fold, you just swipe. When you fold, just throw your hand. You interact with the device in a totally different way, which is extremely important if you want to attract the casual users. They might not be the superprofes- sional poker players. They enjoy poker, but they want to have something fun as well, and not just a static poker game. I think that’s really important. Everybody is starting to understand that now. We’ve come a long way, and we’ll continue to innovate now, because mobile is on the top of our roadmap. JAQUES: The next innovation is what we’re calling Strobe, which is our version of fast-forward poker, or the equivalent of Rush Poker. Playing just about everybody’s game out- side of, say, PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker, you play one game at a time, one table at a time. When you’re waiting for your turn because you folded pre-flop, it takes a while, maybe a minute between hands. With Strobe, we’ve brought fast-forward poker to the mobile device. It’s the perfect mobile product. When launched, we’ll be the only B2B company that offers a B2B mobile product for iOS and Android tab- lets and phones with fast-forward poker. The experience is night and day, because you get a bad hand, you fold it. Up pops the next one. That’s the interface that people need to play on these types of devices. KJELL: And it taps into the regular li- quidity, and you have your regular wallet, so it doesn’t matter where you play. You will still have a lot of action. You’ll have your money. You also have the Instant Rewards system. Q: That folds right into it, too. KJELL: Exactly. That’s also connected to Strobe and to mobile, so you can con- tinue to try to achieve what you set out to achieve. Q: A lot of people in the industry talk about mobile gaming. What are your player numbers telling you? What kind of growth rate are you seeing? How many people are actually playing on mobile devices? KJELL: It is a bit of a tricky question, be- cause it depends on which market you’re talking about. To be accepted on the App Store can be a bit tricky. Since we’re a B2B company, we are dependent on our cus- tomers, the B2C companies. It’s easier to get acceptance in the Apple App Store if you go into regulated markets where you have a very clear and defined license for that market. For instance, I can share num- bers for France. What we’ve seen is that we had linear growth, and that basically up to 10 percent of the total revenues in France came frommobile. That’s a lot. We see that it is fantastic adaptation, and we see that iOS is dominating Android. iOS users are much more prone to play on their devices. Also, I think the iOS devices historically have better performance than some of the Android devices. But I think Android is catching up a lot, because there are some fantastic devices out there. 28 Can mobile and social save online poker ?