Partypoker Buys Up 2 Former Pokerroom Skins
Published: Saturday, November 12, 2005 Online-Casinos.com
PARTYPOKER BUYS UP 2 FORMER SKINS
Talks with Empire Online continue, and Coral Eurobet will go it alone
Party Gaming was moving fast this week following its decision to seperate from its partypoker poker room skins last month.
The market leading online poker room site has announced that it will pay $14.5 million (GBP 8.34 million) for its former skin Multipoker and, it is believed, $4 million for most of IntertopsPoker.
The third of its top skin operators, Coral Eurobet, will remain independent and will be migrating its players to a new and as yet unidentified platform.
Party Gaming is already in buy-out talks with the fourth major skin, Empire Online (Empire Poker) at what is believed to be a substantially lower price than that offered by Sportingbet and declined (see previous Online-Casinos.com & InfoPowa reports).
Partypoker has already announced that early in the New Year it intends to combine its diverse online gambling interests into a single mega-site which will offer a wide range of gambling types - including skill-, poker and casino games.
"We now look forward to the launch of the Party-branded integrated platform in the first half of 2006, when we will expand the number of games available to our customers," said chief executive Richard Segal.
The loss of players from Multipoker, IntertopsPoker and Coral Eurobet means those from Empire Online will have fewer players to compete against, called "player liquidity" and this carries the risk that Empire players may move on, further devaluing the company.
