Time for a Reality Check
Background
Compliance with the UK Gambling Commission regulation on “Reality-Checks” has highlighted the weaknesses inherent in a lot of operators. The reality check is a pop-up notification at regular periods offering the player an opportunity to take a break or cool-off period.
What’s the Problem
You’d expect this to be a relatively straightforward implementation for operators however for some reason a number of operators have struggled to meet the generous deadlines and have been asking for a grace period to make the changes.
Tale of Two Brands
William Hill have voluntarily withdrawn over 100 casino games as they do not comply with the reality-checks requirement. So clearly Project Trafalgar hasn’t got to the casino yet.
On the other hand SkyBet announced “the company had built its own solution for reality check functionality, taking the issue out of provider’s hands, and as a result had not had any problems”.
Our View
This highlights our view that operators need to control their own front-end and not rely upon third party software providers. A lot of operators have outsourced the problem to game providers who by and large are not known for speed or adaptability (look at how long HTML5 games took).
Scandi Casinos
BetIt the company behind the brands Thrills, Kaboo and SuperLenny have announced they will be leaving the EveryMatrix platform and moving to the Gaming Innovation Group platform called “iGaming Cloud“. iGaming cloud is also the platform for Guts and Rizk.
Loser?
The loser here is clearly EveryMatrix who have just lost three flagship brands from their platform.
Winners?
The winners are the ever sharp Optimizer Invest who are shareholders in BetIt and iGaming Cloud.
In the Wings?
GVC are a shareholder in Betit and have a call option to acquire the balance of outstanding shares between July and September 2017. Interestingly according to GVC reports Betit “underperformed against its previous forecast provided by the Betit management”, so we see the moving of platform as very strategic for future growth and possible sale.
News Round-Up
Lots of News from Google I/O developer conference
Key for us are
20% of Google mobile queries are voice searches and Google announced it’s own Amazon Echo competitor (top selling product on Amazon) called Google Home. Voice search and commands are hotting up and it won’t long until we are in a Captain Picard world of chatting with the computer.
Firebase – which has been one of the biggest developer launches for Google. Firebase bills its self as a Back-End As A Service (yes really BaaS). In short it is unified platform for Android / iOS and mobile web development. Our view is that this will become as ubiquitoius as Google Analytics and Doubleclick. Lovely overview here
Accelerated Mobile Pages – you can now see reporting for AMP pageviews in Google Analytics joining the Error Message reporting in Search Console
Finally the long expected “Andorid Instant Apps” where users can open an app without installing it first. We see this as a game changer trend and expect Apple to also follow suit as it solves the storage issue on mobile devices. Early sign-up here
Survey
Robin one of our Junior Engineers is finishing his thesis project, where he is turning one of our internal display tools into a consumer facing product. He has prepared a survey and it would be great if you can take 2 minutes to answer some simple questions. We’ll also make sure you get beta access once it is ready. Survey Here