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Dominique wrote:I know this sort of does fit the heading of this thread, but I would like to keep the focus on MM, Roxy, Fortune and PP changing T&Cs. Cooks is still in flux I think and posting one’s grievances would do most good in the Casino Rewards section. There they will be heard by someone who may possibly be able to do something about it. Cooks is a somewhat different situation from the others above.
Well my comments about Cooks regards how they have treated me in the years I have been with them. I feel they have stolen money from me so I prefer to not voice my complaints/frustrations in the Casino Rewards section. Rewards has always been fair and honest.
I understand that.
However, the topic of this thread is about Money Mechanics, Roxy, Fortune and Party Poker and how they changed the Terms and Conditions of their affiliate agreement.
If you want to vent about integrity, you could start another thread about that.
This one is about programs who sudenly change their Terms and Conditions and don’t keep their promises.
Dominique wrote:I understand that.However, the topic of this thread is about Money Mechanics, Roxy, Fortune and Party Poker and how they changed the Terms and Conditions of their affiliate agreement.
If you want to vent about integrity, you could start another thread about that.
This one is about programs who sudenly change their Terms and Conditions and don’t keep their promises.
And Vegas Partner Lounge, Dom
Dominique wrote:I understand that.However, the topic of this thread is about Money Mechanics, Roxy, Fortune and Party Poker and how they changed the Terms and Conditions of their affiliate agreement.
If you want to vent about integrity, you could start another thread about that.
This one is about programs who sudenly change their Terms and Conditions and don’t keep their promises.
I was responding to a question about Cooks that was in THIS thread. Because the you feel the question did not belong in this thread then I shouldn’t respond to it? My intent was not to complain about Cooks but to answer a question someone posted in this thread. Give and take, isn’t that what this forum is about?
Besides, you suggested that maybe I should have voiced my complaints about Cooks in the Casino Rewards section and I was explaining to you why I didn’t think that was appropriate.
Oh and the topic of this thread is Broken Promises not Money Mechanics, Roxy, Fortune and Party Poker.
Back on track…..
Im beginning to think the problem lies with Microgaming, looking back they have lost quite a few ( probably dozens) of licensees over the past few years,
they either shut up ( the smaller operations) and go or jump to another software provider ( the big boys), now we have a bunch of Microgaming skins trying to cut back on affiliate payments.I dont know how much their (Microgamings) cut of a casinos profit is but looking at this situation after the ecash provider/microgaming/affiliates have had their cut maybe there isnt a lot left for the owner??
Well, this was sort of part of the chat discussion we had.
Some of us were convinced that money problems were at the root of this, some insisted they knew that was not so.
Whether that is so or not, in order to prevent losing our income with programs that have decided to lump casinos, like Fortune and Vegas Partner, we are forced to only promote one casino from each group.
That way we cut down on the possible damage. Losing your income from one casino is a lot easier to swallow than losing it for a bunch of them.
I have dropped groups of Playtech casinos for this, now Micro is doing the same thing. I think one casino each of bundling programs is really plenty – so many decent casinos out there.
Maybe this is a good thing for us affiliates – I have always believed that it is best to distribute income among many programs. It keeps it nice and steady and it never hurts to drop someone. Unfortunately it makes some of the programs unhappy with you – they of course want all your players. But it also evens the playing field for the casinos and I think players are much more likely to develop loyalty to your site if they have a varied selection.
The days of a small, crisp site with only a few casinos “so not to confuse the player” are over because the times of purchased traffic are over. You want to offer a good selection of different casinos and softwares and a lot of content to your visitors now.
I have never seen it as wise to send all one’s players to one or two programs, even though they do raise your percentage as incentive.
Promoting a variety gives you freedom and security. Just taking one casino from each of the programs that bundle, and that includes playtech groups that do this, and including more RTGs that are decent and just spreading ourselves thin, will assure that we can survive any changes in T&C without much damage to our income.
All of us who have been putting too many eggs in one basket – maybe it’s time to put up some additional baskets and fill them with different eggs to make the move away from bundling and towards independence smoother.
It seems to be the logical move, and it is a move to the better overall for us.
Hi,
well I can only think of how land based casinos have all that incredible overhead, the lights, the mortgage, weekly payroll (which I assure you the online casinos payroll pales in comparison not matter how you care to twist it) and the promos, comps, etc which in the comps respect, likely again, has the online costs pale in comparison – and cannot for one minute think that if the land based versions are able to prosper, that their online cousins cannot.
I realize that Microgaming takes a big piece of the pie, but the way its set up, I cannot imagine any tightly run ship ever facing money problems.
Give Microgaming some credit. Actually a lot of credit. They’ve picked up the tab when their casinos fail (at least in the case of the players, we are another story and I cannot say in our respect, other than I don’t recall them ever stepping in to pay affiliates. Correct me if I’m wrong). And they do that because its good business. They don’t have to. So with that in mind, I can’t imagine them bleeding their licensees to the point of bankruptcy, or even anywhere near that. It just wouldn’t be good business.
Whaddya think to that?
Oh, and somebody had mentioned the no-negative carry over thing, as a possible reason for this move.
When’s the last time you, or anybody you know, had a huge winner the month before, and then, like they should be expected to do, have the player return and lose most or all of it back the following month, therefore giving that affiliate a big boost in income as a result.
To be honest, the last time I heard of anybody being this lucky, was me.
with Casino Rewards, back in April of 03. (trust me, the date is right, I remember that month).I recall that Randy found himself in a position for this to happen once, but as I recall, he didn’t really end up prospering from it.
I don’t recall anybody else saying anything about this happening. But I’m sure there are a few, but that said, how many is enough to really upset the financial well-being of a major program?
And most curiously, I bet that this situation DID NOT happen to the programs that are wanting to change their terms.
Whaddya say to that?
I agree with Dom on the one casino thing with combined payout groups. I apreciate that a casino can choose to create affiliate agreements how they want and it’s up to us to decide how/if we promote them.
What i do find difficult to take is when they change the terms and apply it retroactively as in the case of VPL and FA. If they can do it once they can do it again. If other casinos can see affiliates will take it on the chin, then they may follow suit. It’s a shame because until now, I’ve always held FA in high regard and had they decided to apply these terms from now, and not retroactively on players already sent, I would respect that and keep them on no problem. hell if they are in trouble i might even have promoted them more to try and protect everyone’s interests.
To this end and after much thought, i have decided to remove ALL F.A and VPL casinos from my sites this week, partially to take a stand and partially in my own best interests of reducing risk. I had to ask myself a question to come to this decision: both programs are way off being my best earners so it won’t hurt me financially, nor will it exactly cause a financial stir at either group. But will i do it with my best-performing groups if they apply similar changes retroactively? I would, hence my decision. And i hope I’m not alone.
Cheers
Simmo!
PS. As a footnote and I hasten to add, not a Fortune Affiliates issue, one of the Fortune Lounge casinos emailed a player yesterday to say that if they Reversed their withdrawal they had just made, they would be entered into a prize draw. Make of that what you will, but irresective of the potential benefit to an affiliate, I found that a very distasteful development (as did the player for that matter).
I just wanted to chime in on this “Promote just one casino if they bundle” idea.
Bundling the casinos basically means that all those casinos are just one big casino from the affiliate point of view anyway. You can’t make the pain go away by promoting only one casino of a group. If you send the same players to just one casino, that one big winner will wipe out the profits in your one casino just like he or she would have wiped out the whole group of casinos because of the bundle.
Please note that I’m NOT saying there’s no effect to bundling. There is, and it could be a big one. What I am saying is that if you choose to still promote a program that bundles, it matters not a bit whether you promote one casino or all of them. They’re all one casino, whether you promote the different brand names or not.
Lets say I promote 30 casinos.
If 10 of them are Fortune and Vegas Partner are another 5, lets say, one winner in each group will wipe out half my income for that month because I will only have 15 producing casinos.
If only one of the thirty is Fortune, and one more is Vegas Partners, that means I have 28 casinos producing normally.
My visitors will spread out among all the casinos offered. Fortune and Partner will get a much smaller percentage of my players.
The rest will go to other offered casinos.
There are a bunch of deserving Microgaming programs out there. My visitors are hardly all going to go to Havana because it’s a Fortune Lounge property. They could care less. They will be just as happy at King Neptunes or someplace else.
I see your point Dominique. My post assumed that you would replace all existing Fortune casinos with just one Fortune casino, rather than replacing the other Fortune casinos with other program casinos.
My assumption would be a dumb way to approach the problem.
Bottom line: You’re right.
No prob. Made me think it through again. It’s definitely the way to go. :drink:
but irresective of the potential benefit to an affiliate, I found that a very distasteful development (as did the player for that matter).
Ok here is another thing really starting to tick me off as a player, back in the day when I played more then I worked…lol I had Royal Vegas on my puter, now I uninstalled it the other day to clean up my stuff, can you imagine 5 hours later a rep called my house to ask why I took off the casino!! I felt so exposed and totally went off on the gentlemen about invading my privacy.
This is just plain wrong! The phone calls about great bonuses are on my nerve too, I have an email they can use and if I am interested I will deposit but don’t dare call my damn house!
This all leads me to think money is the problem, Micro will bleed ya dry from what I have heard…could be incorrect but I know they take a good chunk of money from the operators.
Micro will bleed ya dry from what I have heard
I disagree for the reasons I stated. However, I too, cannot say for sure.
But it just doesn’t make sense that they would step out of their way to make sure players get paid, and then turn around and gouge their licensees so hard as to put them out of biz.
examine what we know to be true.
they step in and pay players for casino Red which went out of biz, and then turn around and effectively are the cause for casino Blue to go under.
we know they did step in and pay players.
we don’t know about the latter.All the while keeping the good name of Microgaming in good standing with the players. But who’s gonna want to buy into a franchise which the year before; showed a number of licensees that went under; and these are casinos which were around long enough that if anybody should have been able to weather the storm, it should have been them. (Cap Cooks as example – plenty of player base there to use as an email campaign to get players back in and playing).
if I were thinking about plunking down the price Microgaming gets: which is the highest, or close to it: I’d be thinking twice after seeing established casinos go under.
So where is the logic in keeping players happy (spending $) at casinos that went out of biz, while at the same time gouging the remaining casinos – essentially putting them out.
That sounds too much like self destructive behavior to me. And one thing I will not accuse MGS of being, is stupid in the big picture of things.
