IGT chief confirms Entraction shutdown
Patti Hart blames poker's shift to dot.country for making business less profitable despite Italy and France adopting model five and two years ago.
IGT chief executive Patti Hart has confirmed the Nevada licensee’s plans to shut down its online poker network, citing the ring-fencing of liquidity in certain dot.country markets as the primary cause for the move.
Last week eGaming Review exclusively revealed the gaming machines manufacturer was planning to pull back from further investment in the network which it acquired little over a year ago for approximately £70m and rebranded from previous incarnation Entraction in January.
It emerged soon after that operators on the network had been informed of plans to close the network in December, with one of the largest skins on the network “ iGame “ confirming that it was close to joining a different network. It revealed this morning that it will migrate its liquidity to the Microgaming poker network before the end of this year.
Speaking to Bloomberg, Hart explained that the business “Shifted from dot-com to dot-country,” meaning “There’s less profitability and the product becomes less interesting.”
France, however had already adopted the dot.country model in 2010 while Italy’s plans to regulate and ring-fence poker had already been set in motion before IGT acquired Entraction. However this year has seen Spain and Denmark also go down the dot.country route.
Hart also hinted at issues associated with ring-fenced liquidity in relation to Nevada, where the company is among the first to have been awarded an egaming licence, saying “It’s much more challenged when it’s a single state.”
In IGT’s third-quarter results statement, issued in July, the company noted that “Excluding the interactive businesses, revenues were flat,” however it declined to break out any specific numbers for IGT Poker.
However there has, by and large, been more praise forthcoming for the company’s social gaming arm, Double Down Interactive, which has signed deals with several US casinos including Golden Acorn and Casino Del Sol.
The business, acquired for an initial US$250m in January this year, was described in Q2 as having contributed “accelerated growth,” and despite a slight decline in Q3 maintains more than five million monthly active users according to AppData.
Double Down added Texas Hold’em Poker to its Facebook casino suite in May this year, with bingo following earlier this month.