Online Poker, The Leading Edge

Online Gaming Software Grows Up The next generation of gaming software must be r eliable and stable. The market and the high cost of player acquisition demand no less. Technology exists that provides the same kind of robustness and scalabili ty found in numerous fail-safe platforms like mission-critical financial systems and air traffic control systems. Developing such platforms requires careful, ri gorous design, implementation and testing, and takes years to complete, but what gaming company can settle for less? Early online gaming software was PC-based, single-user games downloaded or on CD . Developers extended these games to support multiple players online. The popula rity of online poker caught those developers by surprise. The underlying archite cture was not designed to support thousands of simultaneous users, playing frequ ent large tournaments. Compounding these challenges were poor internet connectio ns including modems. As online poker took off, leading sites attracted more players than the designer s had anticipated. The early systems failed and crashed spectacularly sometimes taking down gaming sites for hours every day, interrupting tournaments and alien ating players. Gaming software developers reacted by re-architecting with countl ess patches and fixes, forcing time-consuming client downloads. Many do not realize that poker software is still not as stable as the industry r equires and nowhere close to the stability of online stock trading applications. As recently as last year, two of the top five sites suffered damaging multi-day outages. Most networks crash or experience unacceptable lag every few days. MTB F (Mean Time Between Failures) is a measure of how often you can expect your onl ine poker room to crash. Ask vendors to document in writing their historical MTB F. Poker and Social Networking Gaming has always been about entertainment. Social n etworks like MySpace and Facebook have attracted tens of millions of users, and their growth continues. The popularity is based on the simple fact that people l ike to congregate, share interests and play together. Poker software developers have started to build social networking concepts into their platforms allowing players, for example, to congregate in private rooms. T his functionality may be superseded, though, by a parallel trend. Spurred by Fac ebook opening up their platform to allow embedded applications, poker operators ha ve created versions of their games that can be played right inside Facebook pages. CyberArts recently created such an application for its licensee PurePlay, which operates highly successful online poker tournaments in a U.S-legal subscription model. The PurePlay Facebook client is downloadable from within any user s Facebook page, and users can invite friends and acquaintances to play. A Flash-based version o f the client will allow game play within a Facebook page. A page can be an individual Facebook profile, or can be a special page created f or a group or organization. This capability will give rise to informal groups an d teams. Players can organize tournaments around schools, football clubs, brands , hobbies the possibilities are limitless, and such groups can come together qui ckly and with little or no investment in software development. Big Media and Advergaming Gaming is increasingly about branding and transmitting a marketing message to mass audiences of players. We ve recently seen a growing i nterest in online poker from Big Media, i.e., television, news and other print com panies. They reason that free online poker is a good way to attract players to t heir sites, cementing brand loyalty and providing eyeballs for advertising. These companies require flexible interfaces where the cards, chips and especially the table felt may be branded to reflect an advertisers look and messages. CyberArts f

lexible interface allows ads to be embedded into the game on the game table, chi ps and cards. High definition interfaces are possible, freeing marketers from a me-too look and feel. An example is shown above a free online poker game offered by CyberArts licensee The Score, which is Canada s leading sports television and radio network. Built i nto ScorePoker is sophisticated advergaming server software built by Toronto based Advertising Gaming Network. AGN s software displays ads intelligently. It draws d ata about players from The Score s member database say, the player s geographic loca tion, and sports interests and combines it with player history data. It then dis plays ads tailored to each player. A Vancouver player might see local ads, while a football fan who s won a big tournament might see a congratulatory banner from his favorite team and Molson Ale. Players see ads at the appropriate time during a game, for instance after a hand is folded or during a break. No player is goi ng to click on an ad when they are thinking about whether to call a big raise. W hy bother to show ads at times like that? Games Beyond Poker Finally, the future of online poker will surely include other games that can be cross-sold to the same audience. Having built a profitable ba se of players that enjoy gaming, it makes sense to offer them allied products su ch as other games. Of course, a consistent look and feel, with single sign-on an d shared wallet, is the only way to go. A universal gaming platform built to ent erprise class standards of reliability should be part of the strategic plan for every successful operator. For more information, you can check on <a href="http://www.cyberarts.com" target ="blank">advergame</a>.