Home / Poker News March 2012 / The Poker Grapevine – ShuffleMaster Acquire OnGame
The Poker Grapevine – ShuffleMaster Acquire OnGame
Posted by: James Carter. - Wed, 2012-03-07 06:52
Bwin.party have been looking to unload the OnGame network for a while and it looks like they may have already found a taker: on Monday, the announcement was made that ShuffleMaster, a company well-known world-over for manufacturing card shufflers and chip sorters, has announced that it was going into a €19.5 million deal, effectively acquiring the OnGame network from bwin.party. The goal of the move is an obvious one: ShuffleMaster, thus far known as a company providing services to other gambling operations, will get the chance to break into the regulated online poker markets, offering a scalable and secure online poker solution for the companies with which it shall partner. ShuffleMaster’s focus will remain on being a business-to-business company, offering an online poker platform but not directly dealing with the public.
According to ShuffleMaster CEO Gavin Isaacs, the OnGame acquisition fits perfectly into the plans of his company to deliver its brand to online gaming operators, social networks and even mobile platforms in the future.
In other news: the overall online poker traffic seemed to have further declined last week, albeit by a relatively meager margin of 0.6%. The dip marked the 4th straight week of declining traffic numbers for the besieged industry.
PokerStars once again finished at the top of the traffic-list, followed by
PartyPoker in second place and iPoker in 3rd. 888Poker didn’t do badly either: they made 4th place, followed by the OnGame Network in 5th.
Putting things into a year-by-year perspective: compared to this time last year, the overall traffic drop amounted to a massive 31%. Besides the operations which went under for good, the Ongame Network, PKR and IPN shouldered the majority of that burden. PKR for instance lost about 36% of their players from last year, while the OnGame Network saw a drop of 24%.
The Merge Gaming network was one of the biggest gainers, registering an 89% uptick.
