After more than a year of searching for a buyer, bwin.party has sold its Ongame Network to Amaya Gaming Group, a Montreal-based gaming solutions company. The deal will be worth up to €25 million.

Rumblings about the sale began a couple of weeks ago and, as recently as last week, Amaya had reportedly agreed to purchase the poker network for just $6.5 million to $8 million. According to press releases from bwin.party and Amaya, the latter will be paying a minimum of €15 million for Ongame.

Should online poker become legalized and regulated in the United States within the next five years, Amaya is prepared to pay up to an additional €10 million depending on how many states adopt legalized online poker and how many people that encompasses.

The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of this year and was talked about to a great extend at the G2E Global Gaming Expo in Las Vegas, which PocketFives attended. Amaya also owns CryptoLogicand recently purchased Cadillac Jack, which makes brick-and-mortar slot machines. Its booth at G2E was surprisingly quaint.

Ongame is the fifth most trafficked online poker network in terms of cash game players according to PokerScout. Despite that standing, when PartyPokermerged with bwin, which owned Ongame, the network was determined to be a “surplus asset” and the new combined company began looking for buyers.

One suitor was found this spring in Shuffle Master (now SHFL Entertainment), which agreed to purchase Ongame for £13 million. Unfortunately for bwin.party, Shuffle Master backed out in June, citing “European market conditions,” and bwin.party had to go back to the drawing board.

Explaining the reversal, SHFL CEO Gavin Isaacs said at the time, “It has become evident to us that Ongame’s operations post-acquisition will not achieve the near-term results we initially expected and will require a larger ongoing investment than anticipated.”

This will be Amaya’s first online poker product. The company develops and licenses casino games to online gaming sites, which can then integrate them into their own brand. The Canadian outfit also provides games to brick-and-mortar venues and offers lottery products to governments.

It appears that Amaya’s interests lie in owning the network and licensing the technology to clients rather than running a poker room. In its press release, Amaya said that the purchase “complements and strengthens Amaya’s B2B interactive product portfolio.” We’ve also heard rumblings that Ongame could strengthen Amaya’s presence in Europe.

Said Amaya CEO David Baazov, “The acquisition of Ongame bolsters Amaya Gaming’s product portfolio, transforming Amaya into a leading provider of gaming platforms. Amaya looks forward to unleashing Ongame’s technology to its full potential through the leveraging of our many B2B relationships and delivering new partners and players to the network. The Ongame platform is scalable, proven, and secure and is well suited for quick deployment in new regulated markets. We’re excited about the wide range of opportunities this acquisition makes possible for us as we execute on our vision.”

Amaya will need to leverage those B2B relationships to grow the network, as bwin.party plans to take the largest Ongame skin, bwin, and move it to PartyPoker’s platform before the deal is completed. That will take a sizable bite out of Ongame’s player base while boosting PartyPoker, which is currently tied with the iPoker Network for the second spot in the industry with a seven-day average of 2,700 cash game players.

Jim Ryan and Norbert Teufelberger, Co-CEOs of bwin.party, expressed their pleasure with the deal, saying, “The sale of Ongame conforms to our strategy, especially as we move closer to launching our single, proprietary technology platform in the next few months. We believe Ongame will fit well into Amaya Gaming and has an excellent future ahead.”

Ryan was the keynote speaker at G2E on Wednesday, regurgitating the history of online poker in the United States and arguing for the regulation of the industry in front of a crowd of about 200.

PocketFives Editor in Chief Dan Cypra contributed to this story.