Fortune Creek Poker Gives Card Sharks a Place to Visit Instead of a Game to Play

Fortune Creek Poker is a free-to-play poker simulation for Facebook from Social Monster Ltd launched on May 16. The game aims to provide a different experience to the many competitors looking to unseat Zynga's Texas HoldEm Poker as the poker simulation of choice on the social network. According to our traffic tracking service, AppData, Fortune Creek Poker currently has 27,000 monthly active users and 2,000 daily active users. The actual gameplay is what it sounds like -- poker. Social Monster managing director Jody Clarke explains, however, that the game's uniqueness comes from its setting. The game environments include a randomly animated dealers that have their own back stories and animated background scene elements. The idea, says Clarke, is to give players the feeling of visiting a wild west casino. He believes this is key to differentiating the product from Zynga's Texas HoldEm Poker and all its many clones. "As avid online poker players ourselves, we felt the genre was lacking greatly in creativity and originality from current poker games," he says. "They all seemed to be following the same generic 'millionaire club' style, almost certainly as an attempt to simply carbon copy Zynga’s already established and immensely successful model." In contrast, he says, "[Fortune Creek] is a place to actually visit rather than a game to simply play." The game is monetized through the sale of poker chips, which can be accumulated through winning games, participating in promotions via the game's offer wall, or by purchasing them using PayPal, credit card, phone, bank transfer, prepaid card or cash. Facebook Credits have not yet been implemented. Clarke says this was a conscious decision to emphasize well-established payment methods within the game during the first few months, and then introduce Facebook Credits at a later time. We expect, within the next six weeks, if Fortune Creek wants to comply with Facebook's mandatory implementation deadline. In the short term, the development plan for the game is to add more artwork and animated backdrops to the game, offering players more variety. Long term, however, Clarke says the team plans to expand the Fortune Creek brand into a range of different games, with players' in-game currency transferable between the different titles in the series. "Fortune Creek will become a larger, living and breathing place to visit that will contain a multitude of games and activities," he says. "[But] currently all of our efforts regard Fortune Creek Poker only, as we try to establish a fun and fantastic game for our early adopters." Fortune Creek Poker is in its early days, yet, but we've seen that gambling games have potential for strong growth. The ultimate test for Social Monster will be hanging onto its audience in the long haul. You can follow Fortune Creek Poker's progress using AppData, our traffic tracking application for social games and developers.

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Fortune Creek Poker Gives Card Sharks a Place to Visit Instead of a Game to Play

Pete Davison

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Pete Davison