As I mentioned over the weekend please find below as full as explanation as I can give as to our strategy and tactics regarding the migration of players from JPP to SlotsMagic.
Hopefully it covers all the issues raised by this community in posts about the change from JPP to SlotsMagic.
In fact, handover is a good word. We had been working with WMS for some months after concluding the deal to acquire the assets of JPP and the plans were worked out by both Companies with differing objectives.
From our point of view we wanted to maximize the number of players migrating, why pay huge sums for a database of players and then not do everything possible to get all the same players to move across to the new software? We would be crazy not to do it and financially irresponsible not to try and make it 100% if possible. So our marketing plan was as you know it, entice existing players about changes coming, inform them that their accounts have been transferred, offering free money and other incentives and then a full range of bonus and other offers to get them to move across.
No apologies here, we run a business and this was our initial marketing strategy. We actually did it well and had a huge uptake of the offers with a lot of players moving across to SlotsMagic.
From Scientific Games side they wanted a professional takeover as they had vested a lot in the name JPP and still do today. Our tactics were approved and cleared as well by the different Licensing Jurisdictions we have to answer to. One major decision was that the announcement of the sale and the date of Migration would not be disclosed prior to the actual date of handover. We complied.
There was no deception just good and well recognized business and marketing practice that has been used for years when migrating players from one platform to another. – again, the overall deal and marketing plan was presented fully to the Alderney and Malta regulators who knew that the players affected were being transferred to a reliable, safe, multi- jurisdiction, multi-licensed operator. They also knew that we had a procedure in place for users that did not want to migrate (this was a requirement for the plan to be accepted)
And now we have many thousands of happy customers who used to play on JPP and now play at SlotsMagic
I also saw a few comments about users not being given the choice as to whether their data was sold or not (email and website referred to ‘already purchased’). It’s true that your data was passed to SlotsMagic but it’s also true that you could have contacted us to have your details removed. The option was explained in the email sent just prior to the new site being made available and it was also on the jackpotparty.com – quite a few users took this option and of course we complied.
There was a post regarding the ‘password’ so I’ll address that now.
There were no passwords sent from JPP to SlotsMagic, in fact SlotsMagic still don’t have your JPP password. How the log-in works is that you input your password – our gaming system then connects to an algorithm which creates a hash and salt value of your password (each a long list of characters). This hash and salt value is then matched to the hash/salt value which JPP gave to SlotsMagic – if it matches you are in, if not you are not.
The last things I’d like to address are the few comments about why Scientific Gaming didn’t sell the whole casino platform and a final comment about the games. Regarding the platform – it would have been very unlikely that an operator with no platform of their own was going to buy JackpotParty – if that had happened they’d need to start from ground up with servers, staffing, license, procedures, operational buildings…so what that left was for Scientific to sell to an established operator and for an established operator it makes a lot more business sense to buy the user data and migrate them to their platform.
The flip side to this (an established operator buying the whole gaming platform) would have been a lot more difficult and expensive project for the operator. They (we!) would have had 2 gaming systems running on different technology to support, two completely different backoffices meaning that customer support had to look in 2 places and financial reporting coming to different sources. There’s a lot more to it obviously, but that’s the reason that the sale was a data sale and not technology.
Lastly about the games – Scientific/WMS have had their games online for a while and made a business decision about what to keep and what to remove. Unfortunately this was not under our control. What we added was a large catalogue of own produced games , content from Next gen,
Amaya and Aristocrat with many more to come. No one can replace a game you love or are used to but we certainly tried to offer alternatives which had proven success . Now new favorites are being discovered and our commitment to new slots and games is our priority so you will always find something fresh and exciting at SlotsMagic
Sorry for not getting back to you sooner but after discussing things internally we have decided to make one post regarding the migration of players from JPP to SlotsMagic and our marketing strategy to make it a successful handover. There have been quite a few posts on this subject so please bear with me until Monday/Tuesday and hopefully I will be able to cover all the points raised including yours.