The best way to describe it is that our customer is the player, but our partner is the poker room. There was a time, many years ago (PT is now 12 years old) when the developers could be viewed as working in a quasi-grey area back in the days of PT2. When PokerTracker 3 launched, we confirmed that we were in full compliance with the Terms of Service for every room we supported, then went to work creating relationships with each network to the best of our ability - our relationships is one of the reasons why often you see new network support quicker with PT, we are often given a heads up before major changes and more and more frequently as our relationships become more trusted the network might approach us to help them develop a new feature prior to launch. The bigger networks get PT support at no change because they are what the majority of our customers want, but the new networks must offset the cost of our out of pocket development expenses because without this offset it would not pay to add these smaller networks. We are a business after all with a huge overhead of staff payroll that must be addressed. With that said, in theory we do not make a profit when we bill the network for development, we only attempt to break even. We speak with virtually everyone in the business in some form, even Bodog was a close friend at one time. We agreed to leave the Bodog network almost 1 year before the anonymous tables were launched on the day the network was scheduled to switch over; we knew that this was on the horizon and why they wanted to change business plans and we had no objections at the time - we only work with poker rooms that want our customers (and to be honest, it would be bad business to not want PokerTracker users, there are far too many PT users to ignore!).
If there is one thing to take away from this post is that PokerTracker has a LOT of users. Our biggest competitor also has quite a few users. Our combined user base is pretty huge... so huge that tracking + HUD users could make the network a success because they are more likely to be active and engaged rake generators who multitable - and multitabling is critical to the player liquidity of a network. In turn removing players who use tracking tools and HUDs could easily kill a network... of course we have lots of confidential facts & figures to back this all up, but we only share that data with the networks I'm afraid.
- TT
