The world’s largest online poker room has launched a product onto the world’s largest online gaming portal for the PC. PokerStars Jackpot Poker is now available on Steam, but the early reviews are mixed.
PokerStars has jumped over the necessary hurdles to present their free to play social poker and casino game Jackpot Poker to the PC gaming audience that spends their time shooting bad guys and slaying dragons on Steam.
The online gaming platform hit a peak of 14.2m concurrent viewers in January 2017, and have well over 125 million active users, so it makes perfect sense for an online poker room to want a presence in that environment.
But how has the move gone down?
According to the stats on the site, the game has been available on the Steam platform since March 20 and has so far received 57 reviews, generating an average rating of 6/10.
One of the constructive criticisms levelled at the game was the decision to plug a mobile port into a PC environment, stating that the touchscreen operability that is present on the mobile function does not work as well with a keyboard and mouse.
There is also the question as to why someone would want to play Jackpot Poker when the PokerStars client’s free to play options are less prone to crashing, offer arguably the best poker playing experience in the business, and was designed for PC play?
Jackpot Poker houses a myriad of PokerStars branded games such as Spin & Go, casino style slots, and both No-Limit Hold’em and Pot-Limit Omaha games. The game can also be played on iOS, Android and Amazon Fire TV.
PokerStars Follows Deceased Sibling
PokerStars is not the first poker game to appear on Steam. Telltale Game’s Poker Night 2 was released in April 2013 and has an average rating of 9/10 based on 3,822 reviews. Another game that averages well is Prominence Poker, a story based poker game that, Max Pescatori helped create. Prominence Poker has an average rating of 7/10 across 1,121 reviews.
The first mainstream real money online poker room that moved to Steam was Full Tilt. The software that is currently rotting away in the knackers yard joined Steam in January 2016 but received a flurry of early bad reviews with the most of the fingers pointing at the lack of realism caused by the play money situation.
Prominence Poker and Poker Night 2, on the other hand, created more of a story-based video game experience which didn’t place poker front and centre. Perhaps, that’s why PokerStars decided not to transfer the PC client onto Steam and instead went with the bells and whistles of Jackpot Poker.
Personally, I think PokerStars should be bold and move into the Prominence Poker type of gaming experience. The players apparently dig it, and if they could create immersive characters and storylines to go with their top notch poker game software, then Steam players are less likely to give it the big red thumbs down.
