This story is sponsored by WSOP
Caesars’ interactive arm has acquired intellectual property rights and ownership of the World Series of Poker social poker apps from developer Electronic Arts.
Caesars Interactive Entertainment’s Montreal-based Playtika division, which contains the social gaming assets of Slotomania and Bingo Blitz, has also taken on 19 developers from Electronic Arts (EA) to form a social poker development studio. The financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
CIE’s plan is to develop and enhance the current World Series of Poker Facebook and mobile games it currently licenses from EA, which with only around 2,400 monthly active users on Facebook currently lags well behind other social poker games such as market leader Zynga’s Texas Hold’Em Poker, with more than 24 million.
CIE’s heavily indebted parent Caesars Entertainment recently announced plans to spin off Caesars Interactive and the WSOP into a separate company as it looks to improve its balance sheet and ability to make “strategic investments”. Caesars was carrying more than US$20m in long-term debt by the end of 2012.
Caesars Interactive, headed by former PartyGaming boss Mitch Garber (pictured) is also on track to launch WSOP-branded real-money online poker in Nevada this summer, followed by poker and casino games in New Jersey by early 2014.
CIE is also developing its own proprietary poker platform, co-developed with its French software partner Barrière Poker.
Group CEO Gary Loveman admitted in February that it while it would launch in Nevada on software licensed from 888, it was looking to migrate off this onto its own modified version of the Barrière platform “in due time.”
Article written by Peter Holmes
