Q&A: Matt Primeaux, CEO of Amaya’s StarsDraft on adapting daily fantasy for an international audience
Primeaux tells EGR Intel how Amaya’s new Jackpot Sports format can attract a broad spectrum of players
EGR Intel: Who is your target audience?
MP: The audience is deliberately very broad, perhaps to our detriment, but we don’t know yet. The game is built to appeal to everyone; the sports jackpot players, the lottery players who buy Euromillions tickets and poker/skill game players in general.
We’re very optimistic about attracting poker players from the parent PokerStars brand. The game has a ton of similarities to a poker tournament – the prize pool increases as people buy in, while game theory and other analytical skills apply.
One key demographic is those poker players who can’t play as much poker as they used to because as they get older, life gets in the way. We wanted a game that offers the attractive elements of poker tournaments but without the time commitment. You can do research for this game in your lunchbreak and enter in a few minutes.
EGR Intel: Does having this as a standalone site hurt cross-selling opportunities?
MP: It was built as a standalone site for tech reasons. It was just easier to do that way. There isn’t a presence on other Amaya sites currently because this is still very much a soft launch. The game is brand new and it is constantly being tweaked based on the usage figures and feedback from players using it now.
Once that’s done, the game will see visibility in the PokerStars client and more visibility on the BetStars site. BetStars will also start some CRM and reactivation campaigns to try and tap into some lapsed players.
EGR Intel: Who do you view as your biggest rivals in this space?
MP: The aim of the game is to be as complementary as possible to its parent brand BetStars. It is not about direct competition with other brands because right now none of the competition in the international space has expanded enough to have standalone liquidity in its own right. So BetStars want to be the driving force behind this new kind of game which offers better engagement and a new kind of second screen experience. We are hoping we can fix some of the issues that ruin DFS for a lot of people.