Poker App Failure Could Mean Tough Times Ahead

(Photo: Pokerstars.com)

PokerStars recently took the plunge into expanding their online poker offerings for mobile with their highly touted “Duel” application. This first attempt at capitalizing on the increasing use of mobile for gaming was a huge experiment towards trying to tap into the recreational player base poker networks so covet. Unfortunately, the results are in and they aren’t pretty. After a mere four months, the plug has been pulled. A representative for the world’s largest poker site said that the decision had been made “after reviewing usage data from the beta launch and determining that it was not commercially viable at scale.”

Duel suffered from critical flaws

The idea behind the “Duel” app basically boiled down to correspondence chess (or poker) over you mobile device. A heads up poker tournament would be played between you and an opponent, and moves could be made without any “timer” other than a set time when the tournament would end. The idea of offering the ability to play a heads up poker to with friends at your leisure is not a bad one, but in this case it was poorly executed.

For starters, the key aspect of heads up poker that makes it enjoyable is the fast-paced action. That dynamic is not possible when you can wait hours, or even a day, for your opponent to make a move. But an even more critical flaw was the fact that the time restrictions to move were set per action - meaning that if you had a day to respond, it meant a single hand could take days as players responded to raises and re-raises across multiple streets.

The end result was that a match could literally take months to play - not exactly a fun, adrenaline inducing experience for recreational players.

Recreational player base remains the focus

The “Duel” application is another step in the plans of PokerStars’ parent company Amaya Gaming to change the site over to a recreational player model. Similar to the introduction of the highly popular “Spin & Go” tournaments, “Duel” was designed to attract mobile games that are more interested in a quick gambling fix via poker than in becoming actual poker players.

Despite the abysmal failure of this particular attempt, that is not going to change. Amaya has been very aggressive in their new strategy and this one minor setback will not slow them down. I also think that fears that this might mean there isn’t interest are overblown right now. The fact is that Amaya put out a bad product and people didn’t respond to it. It’s a condemnation of the design and execution of this specific app, and not a lack of interest from the broader market.

However, there is a flipside to this coin, and it’s that the time spent on developing these increasingly wacky variants to attract new players is really laying bare just how little Amaya actually cares for true poker players. Combine that with the fact that they seem to be rushing half-baked ideas out into the marketplace and the picture becomes even more murky.

I would argue that the story of “Duel”’s failure is a failure to take into account the reality that PokerStars’ core product is real poker, and that that product needs to be marketed to a core customer that continues to be the same poker players that Amaya consistently seem uninterested in. Moreover, I think that the longer the company goes without doing anything to appeal to these core customers, the more they hemorrhage their base appeal. Even if everyone can appreciate the effort made towards bringing in new blood, let's hope that the next application will be a little more well thought out, while also having something for true poker players as well.

In the end, the biggest gamble here is that PokerStars could continue to alienate one base without being able to successfully add another one. So while “Duel” might have been a miss, the next time around need to be a hit. If not, there could definitely be some tough times ahead.