[CountDuckula]

Now for a serious answer:

A skin is another site that hooks into the same network; think of it like different doors into a casino. Assume each side door has a doorman who gets a cut of the action of each player that passes through his door, giving him incentive to try to pull players in through it any way he can. Those who pass through the main door give all of their action to the casino, rather than having the casino and the doorman share it.

Until this past weekend, Party had a few skins; Empire, PokerNow, Eurobet, etc. The upheaval was that Party cut itself off from the network the skins are on, and created a new one just for itself. This mostly affects you if you play on the other skins, instead of just Party; Party now has only the players who log on via Party itself, and not those who logged on via Empire or whatever. Since Party is the biggest advertiser, the majority of players who played on the Party network were actually logged in via Party.

Basically, I think Party got tired of hearing about all the deals that you could get on other skins (the doormen were giving kickbacks to the players to entice them to come through their door instead of the main door) and losing players to them (players shopping around for deals might already have an account on Party, but abandon it in favor of a skin that offered them something better), and decided to cut them off. IOW, they opened up another casino upstairs, and connected only the main door to that casino, leaving the downstairs to the doormen and their share of the players.

-Mike