Cryptologic Conundrum
Published: Thursday, February 09, 2006 Online-Casinos.com
CRYPTOLOGIC CONUNDRUM
Who is the mysterious Red Giant, does it own Omni and who's changing to RTG software?
Online-Casinos.com and InfoPowa has been trying to unravel some pretty mysterious corporate manoeuvring that seems to be in progress this week, involving turnkey provider Cryptologic-Wagerlogic, their longtime licensee Peak Entertainment and two of its casinos, the software provider Real Time Gaming and a hitherto unknown UK company called Red Giant Limited.
Here's a summary to date:
Peak Entertainment, one of Cryptologic-Wagerlogic's long established licensees had the following online casinos and internet poker rooms in their stable:
Sands of the Caribbean
1on1
Omni
Caribbean Sun Poker Room
3 Diamonds
49er
Several of these claimed to be powered by Omni, but this was clearly Wagerlogic software, presumably under license.
Last month 49er was "unavailable" for a brief period and this was noticed in passing, however an alert player this week noticed that it had changed to RTG software. On inspection, the site referred to a hitherto unknown UK company called Red Giant Limited, which claimed that it owned Omni and 49er and had negotiated a deal with Time Warner to use the cartoon character Yosemite Sam in it's promotional work.
Note that the players had no intimation of change up to then.
Coinciding with this, 49er players started receiving promo emails from Peak Entertainment - pushing the new software at 49er.
This begged the questions - what is the relationship between Red Giant and Peak Entertainment? What is happening regarding player accounts? Who owns Omni? Why has only one casino (49er) switched to RTG and are there future plans for other casinos in the Peak group to follow suit? What happens to the poker operation? Who is Red Giant, and what other online gambling interests does it hold? Why have these moves not been made known to the players and the online gambling community at large?
Despite persistent attempts to obtain answers to these questions from RTG, Cryptologic, Red Giant and Peak Entertainment very little further is known.
Red Giant refused to comment. Peak ignored repeated emails, as did senior execs at RTG and Cryptologic made a guarded comment along the following lines:
1) They too are puzzled and will seek clarification from Wagerlogic, which has an exclusive licensing deal with Peak for both casino and poker which covers Sands, Sun Poker and Omni. As far as is known there are no plans to change this.
2) Last year the smaller Peak brands like 49er, 1on1 and 3 Diamonds were the subject of closedown discussions in pursuit of the corporate objective of focusing on the more successful and profitable operations.
3) They are not familiar with the Peak - Red Giant relationship.
We are still digging on this, but it certainly looks as if Peak is putting together some sort of deal with Red Giant on these smaller properties - but then why is Omni involved? And without Cryptologic's knowledge?
