All has been quiet from PokerStars about Power Up in recent weeks. This week, however, we’ve seen Power Up artwork appear all over a PokerStars promotion.
If you are hoping for a fantastic promotion around playing Power Up, I have some bad news for you. It doesn’t involve playing Power Up. The “Collectables” promotion may be covered in Power Up avatars and artwork, but it is a drive to get people playing more Spin & Gos.
Essentially, players can earn up to $1000 by collecting Power Up avatars, simply by spinning a “Collectables Reel.” Everyone gets a free spin every day, and players of Spin and Gos get an extra spin for every 3 games they play. If you manage to fill a line on a bingo style card, you get a prize. You also get entered in an “All In Shootout” with the chance to win a $30k Platinum Package if you manage to find one of the rare cards.
While this pretty standard PokerStars promotion isn’t focussed on Power Up, it does show that the game hasn’t fallen off the radar of the marketing team at PokerStars Towers on the Isle of Man. Using these assets as part of a mainstream promotion may be laying the ground work for a renewed push for the Power Up game type. By putting these images in front of the players most engaged with the PokerStars brand, the game is getting exposed to many who may have missed it in the past.
Hopefully, the next time we see Power Up on the promotions page of the PokerStars client it will be attached to the game itself. The investment PokerStars has attached to the game, and it’s potential as a crossover into the world of video games mean, that it is not going to disappear any time soon, but it needs some love. PokerStars can’t expect the game to grow with no marketing push, or in my opinion, some tweaks to the game itself. Some of my previous articles have made suggestions to what tweaks might work, but I don’t claim to have all the answers.
What is obvious is that Power Up needs exposure to a much wider audience. We’ll have to see what happens next.