Exclusive: Former Idle Games exec appointed PokerStars' social head
Fresh Deck Poker GM Mark Buser joins as Stars looks to compete against Zynga Poker with its PokerStars.net app
PokerStars has hired Mark Buser, formerly general manager of Fresh Deck Poker from Idle Games, as its director of social gaming, Social Casino Intelligence can exclusively reveal.
Buser will be responsible for executing Stars’ strategy to grow and monetise its user base on the free-to-play PokerStars.net site with the aim of replacing Zynga Poker as the dominant social poker brand.
He will report to Rational Group CMO Alex Payne, and is based at the firm’s head office on the Isle of Man, having relocated from San Francisco. His appointment was confirmed by a spokesperson for Idle Games.
The original job posting called for an individual who could help Stars “achieve mass market adoption” and “be able to compete successfully with Zynga Poker to become the number one poker application on Facebook”.
Buser first joined Idle Games in December 2010 as director of monetisation and game design, working simultaneously as general manager of Fresh Deck Poker, a “2.5D” game built with software certified by GLI Group.
After slow uptake on Idle’s Idle Worship MMO title, social casino became the focus of the company, with Fresh Deck since name-checked by Facebook’s director of games partnerships as one of the most innovative games on the social network.
Buser left Idle Games in September 2012, to work on a project called Million Levers, before being hired by Stars in April.
PokerStars first entered the sector with the beta launch of its PokerStars.net Facebook app in February, which currently attracts more than 10,000 MAU on the platform.
The app launched with a variant of Stars’ fast-fold Zoom game, which the company claimed to be the only product of its kind on the social network, and has grown to include tournaments, Sit’n Go and Omaha games.
While the beta-launched Facebook app attracts a relatively small number of players, the operator’s freeplay dot.net destination site is ranked second in PokerScout’s play-money table behind Zynga.
In an interview with SCi Facebook’s head of partnerships for the EMEA region Julien Codorniou said that Stars’ entry into the social casino space could prove to be a “seismic change” for the industry.
I think they are capable of competing against Zynga; they know more about poker than anyone else in the market,” Codorniou said.
“The question remains over how well they will use social and understand user acquisition on Facebook to go up against Zynga, but If there is one company that knows something about how to make a successful poker app, it’s them.”
Read the full interview with Julien Codorniou in issue 12 of SCi, out later this month