Thread: PartyGaming acquires EmpirePoker.com and associated properties - Page 2

PartyGaming will be unable to assist you with enquiries related to revenues for players you referred to Empire Poker, Ace Club Casino or Golden Stars Casino before Feb 14 2006.

Ok guys, what that means is that Party is not honoring any contracts you had with Empire and they stole all your players from you as of a couple of days ago.

They also stole all Ace Club and Golden Stars Players - places they have owned themselves all along. So they are not honoring contracts they themselves had with you either.

Nice bunch of people to trust!

I am SHOCKED!

If anyone from Party would like to discuss this matter and actually take a stab at solving some of the evermounting issues, you know where to find me.

Party bought empire including everything, all the records, everything.

In the real world, you may well get fired after a company take over, but you do have rights to settlements in that case.

It's theft, and I doubt that Party will do the right thing. They didn't even map over the casino players from casinos they owned all along.

This is not just a bad way to act for Party in specific, with all the consolidation now and in the near future, it sets a very troublesome precedent for us. The industry is contracting and consolidating left and right, and this time next year there will be a much smaller number of programs around. Will we all be out of everything we have worked for all these years then?

It would be easy enough for Party to map the players over, like Casino Rewards mapped Captain Cook's players over.

I bet Wager Junction will map the players of the 5 casinos they just bought over for us.

Some places care about affiliates, and some just don't give a hoot. Party has forgotten who made them. Same for Casino Pays, the Partnerpage players were not mapped over.

Shame, shame!

You're right Dom.

However, being morally right doesn't mean being LEGALLY correct.

These limited liability companies that we work with all terminate their responsibilities and liabilities when they cease to exist.

Here's an example.

My partner was once working for a small company, a reasonable company who had problems with one of the buildings they used. The air conditionaing was always on the fritz and they'd just signed up to a 5-year lease.

Anyway the landlord kept dragging the chain ... and the company wanted to move ... but had the lease problem.

What did they do?

TRansferred the lease to a newly formed company (with no assets) amusingly called TROPICAL TENANTS ... moved out ... and then wound up TROPICAL TENANTS.

It took about 3 months and a total of $500 to do. And it was legally all correct. Even though it does not seem right to me ...

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In this case as Empire cease to be an entity - and the players will no longer make money for Empire ... you will be entitled to a lifetime share of ZERO going forward ?


It does seem screwy to me ... Party Poker will be making money from those players at those properties ... and so should inherit their liabilities (your contracts) too.


But I've never been good with legal concepts ... every time i try to think about them i end up shaking my head, screwing up my face, and reaching for a stiff drink ...

Having met with Party at ICE, I was planning on listing them on my sites. As a result of this fiasco, Party will never ever be promoted by me.

I feel for all the Empire Online Affiliates.

Guys, this is only the beginning.

Last time I predicted a big problem I was right. After the second program renegged on the T&C's we signed under, I warned that if we let it slide it would become the status quo. We let it go, and 5 more programs did the same, including large ones, and it took a lot of head butting and perseverance to get things back to normal.

I am now raising a big fat red flag again. This is a terrible precedent, and number 2 already.

We are heading for a year of consolidations, buy outs and take overs, I am absolutely positive. It is already happening all around us. Some programs are doing this the right way and mapping players over. Look at Casino Rewards and Cooks.

Some are stealing our player bases. Affiliate claims must be considered in the purchase negotiations. They were not in this case. They were not in Partnerpage's case.

One year from now we could stand here stripped of the player bases we worked so hard to build up all these years. It is what every affiliate needs to make it - building up a player base. It is our security blanket, our only claim to the future.

Not only that, we were promised "life long" player mapping, not until people decide to merge and totally forget to include affiliate claims in their negotiations. Once again, affiliate contracts are nil and void and cannot be trusted.

There will be a lot more mergers, and we have to be smart and look out for ourselves. If we keep sending players to known thieves, we will suffer the same thing over and over. And all the other programs will follow suit since there is nothing negative that happens when you steal player bases.

We need to pay good attention here! This is our future!

Excellent posts on this topic guys, and I am happy to see the issue is coming out in the open.

FYI...I did talk to my AM at Party Poker regarding this topic, and there response on the topic is that they purchased the room (and the players) for $250M as a going concern. They did not purchase the affiliates and do not even have access to the affiliate database. Party indicated that we should be talking to Empire to settle our disputes regarding this matter as our existing affiliate contract is with Tradel/Empire.

Considering that Tradal sent this email..."Our agreement with you in respect of the PartyGaming websites needs to be modified so that from today's date it will only relate to the websites which we will be retaining rather than PartyGaming's websites. Technically, this means that our existing affiliate agreement with you is terminated with immediate effect in respect of the PartyGaming websites only and we will need to enter a new agreement with you in exactly the same terms but in relation to NoblePoker.com and ClubDiceCasino.com. "

Basically Tradal's position is that "Empire Poker" was sold and we should be talking to Party with respect to the existing Empire players and they effectively cancelled the affiliate contract with all affilites by giving the necessary written notice.

A similar situation happened when Noble was puchased by Tradal from Casino Partners, we had to contact Tradel to move our existing Noble players..as this was not an automatic process. In this instance, our Noble players were transferred and we changed our trackers over to Tradal for future Noble players.

We fortunately do not have a large base of Empire players, probably because we were hesitant to promote the room because of this exact risk, and Party warning us for the last 1.5 years not to promote Empire.

I do feel for those affiliates who are getting caught in a contractual loophole here as we believe that a contract is a contract and existing players on % of rake deals with lifetime commissions should be honored. Considering that the affiliate spent the marketing dollars to acquire the players this should be the case for sure. It is unfortunate that the affiliate agreements are heavily one-sided in favour of the rooms.

I did indicate to our AM at Party that the affiliate community would be extremely negative to this position, their stance is that we should be going after the seller who reaped the reward of the $250M purchase if we want to settle our disputes with existing player relationships.

I find this similar to the conversations I had with CasinoPartners at CAC when they were bragging about the Noble sale, and I indicated at that time the sale was incomplete because the affiliates were not taken care of and the only ones who benefited were the seller.

I do agree with Dominique that the market is ripe for consolidation, and this situation will occur again when the player base from the smaller rooms are acquired by the larger players. I have heard rumours that Poker Stars is on the block as an example. Imagine if you have large player bases for rooms such as Full Tilt, Ultimate Bet, Titan, Bodog, Doyles Room, Paradise, Pacfic, Poker Room, Royal Club, etc. etc. and this happened again and again. The large room acquires the base of players and effectively says we did not acquire the affiliates, your deal was with the existing room - sorry but all existing players are our property, go deal with the seller to settle your existing contracts.

This will happen again - and if the affiliate community is worried about their current revenue streams, I strongly suggest that we take a stance on this matter.