Zynga To Shut All Real Money Gaming Operations In The UK

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Monday, March 9th, 2015 | Written by Adam Brown

In April 2013, Zynga and Bwin.Party established a partnership they hoped would convert some of Zynga’s 32 million registered play-money users into a real money poker and casino playing audience. ZyngaPlusPoker and ZyngaPlusCasino was then born in the UK, which was subsequently viewed as a test ground before launching similar products in the regulated states of the US, but less than two years later and Zynga and Bwin.Party have now effectively ended their unsuccessful partnership. As a result, real-money UK players have now started receiving the following e-mail from Zynga advising them to cash out their accounts:

“We are very sorry to announce that ZyngaPlusPoker and ZyngaPlusCasino will be closing shortly. If you have a balance please log in to withdraw it. If you are having problems logging in you can reset your password or you can always contact us by calling FREE on 08003767968.”

Zynga and Bwin.Party Partnership

Launch of Zynga’s real money gaming (RMG) products took place following a 2012 change in contract between the gaming developer and Facebook which allowed Zynga to offer its RMG on Facebook in those countries where regulation had already been approved. The social games developer then hosted its real-money products on its social media verticals, but with Bwin.Party plugging the games into its online gaming platforms so as to offer communal poker player liquidity, as well as shared casino jackpots. A mobile poker app was subsequently launched a short time later.

Failure To Attract New Players

Despite the ventures potential and the possibility of tapping into the UK’s poker playing market, ZyngaPlusPoker failed to convince its play-money gamers to try their luck at RMG, or even to attract existing poker players from other sites to move over to the Bwin.Party skin hosting ZyngaPlusPoker. Amongst the reasons cited for this failure was a lack of promotional incentives offered by ZyngaPlusPoker, and crucially the fact a large proportion of Zynga and Facebook play money customers are from Asia and aged under eighteen, which would automatically disqualify them from opening up real money poker accounts of their own in Britain. There is also the added difficulty of persuading play-money gamers to part with their cash and start gambling for real, and as an online poster by the name of ‘That Guy’, explains:

“I know a lot of people who play play-money holdem on various sites and when I ask them if they would play real money they always say “NO!”.. I think Zynga didn’t realize that it was such a huge leap for the play money crowd to move over to real money. They dropped the ball on their market research in a huge way. Too bad though, a poker boom is badly needed right now.”

CEO Don Mattrick Needs To Go?

At the end of 2011, Zynga founder Mark Pincus floated the company for $7 billion, but the company has spectacularly failed to keep up its value and today has a market capitalization of $2.32 billion. In July of 2013, Mark Pincus then came under pressure from investors and so stepped down in order to make way for ex-Microsoft exec Don Mattrick, but Zynga’s most recent quarterly earnings ending December 31st, 2014, revealed Q4 losses of $45.1 million. Needless to say, Mattrick has also been on the receiving end of some pretty harsh criticism, and last month BTIG analyst Richard Greenfield wrote a scathing review of the Zynga CEO in a post entitled “Zynga Needs A New Leader – Time for Don Mattrick To Go”. As an extract of the subscription based post explains:

“I think what’s really surprising about the company right now is that they appear to be making the same mistakes. Launching games too quickly, not doing enough consumer research on their games and pushing them out — the same mistakes that [former CEO] Mark Pincus was making when he was leading Zynga. And Don Mattrick was supposed to be brought in — despite not having any experience in mobile gaming, he had been in the gaming world, certainly at Xbox and has a long history in console gaming. He was supposed to be the one who fixed all this, and yet Zynga seems to be stumbling and making the same mistakes all over again.”

Bwin.Party’s Social Gaming Ventures A Disaster

Bwin.Party’s attempts to integrate into the social gaming space has also proved a complete disaster, and while the company sought to introduce social elements to its internet poker product allowing players to better communicate with one other, in the end this did not prove to be an important consideration for the individual poker players themselves. As a result, Bwin.Party has seen its traffic decline steadily over the past year, and even social gaming platform Win Interactive, which Bwin.Party bought in 2013, returned a £7 million operating loss in 2014. As an industry analyst noted at the time:

“Management should be embarrassed by these results given the strong performance of bwin’s peers”.