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.