Ripken, the Baltimore Orioles icon and 19-time All-Star, will lend strategic insights to the board and chief executive Jason Robins on key company initiatives and will become a DraftKings equity holder.
Ripken, a successful businessman and philanthropist since his retirement from baseball in 2001, will be consulted on company strategy, product development and marketing activities.
“Cal Ripken Jr. embodies the qualities of perseverance and integrity we value so highly at DraftKings, and on behalf of the entire company I want to extend our warmest welcome to him as a special advisor,” said Robins.
While land-based and racing revenue fell, online revenue from CDI’s Twin Spires online product brought in $403.4m, up 40.7%. Almost all of this came from its online horse race wagering platform, while $4.3m came from its sports betting and casino brand, which was rebranded under the Twin Spires umbrella earlier this year.
The Churchill Downs site brought in $142.8m, down 48.0%, with $63.3m coming from the racetrack and $79.5m from the Derby City racino at the track.
Venues besides Churchill Downs remained CDI’s largest source of revenue, however, bringing in $441.4m, though this was down 36.3%. The Fair Grounds in Louisiana brought in $97.6m of this total, while Presque Isle in Maine brought in $75.2m and Ocean Downs in Maryland $60.2m. All venues saw revenue decline year-on-year.
CDI brought in a further $61.5m from other sources.
The first phase of the agreement will see eight of the association’s operator members include the number on their websites.
The agreement was signed on International Responsible Gambling Day (20 February), and makes the requirement signed into Spanish legislation to provide resources to those at risk of gambling related harm into a reality, Jdigital said.
The first operators to include the number are Codere, Ebingo, Entain, Flutter Entertainment, Sisal, Sportium, Wanabet and Winamax.
The service will provide help, information and treatment to gamblers and will be available 24/7 throughout the year.
Calls will be answered by trained specialists in the treatment of gambling disorders, who will explain to each user whether they would benefit from the provision of information or if they should be referred to the nearest association to evaluate their behaviour or receive specific treatment.
Fejar will also develop biannual reports reflecting the volume of calls handled through the hotline, and analyse any relevant information that will help in studying players’ behaviour in order to prevent and reduce problems related to gambling.
According to Article 30 of Spain’s Royal Decree on Commercial Communications of Gambling Activities, operators must create direct links to information services on responsible gambling.
The links must be provided in a position which is clearly visible on the website, offering information on gambling disorders, and providing assistance in relation to responsible gambling.
“We are very proud of joining forces with Fejar in the fight against problematic gambling in Spain”, Andrea Vota, director general of Jdigital, said.
“Jdigital’s strong commitment with online gambling users and society in general, as well as with our goal of promoting safe and responsible environments for online gambling activity as a responsible form of entertainment.”
Maxi Gutiérrez, president of Fejar, said: “We are pleased to have signed this agreement with Jdigital and some of the main online gambling companies in the country, because it highlights the importance of joining efforts on the fight against problematic gambling, a task that has been Fejar’s main goal since its foundation in 1991.”
The significant growth of the esports betting industry hasn’t gone unnoticed by legislators. Several nations took great strides to enable legal esports betting in 2020, with Puerto Rico the latest governing body to consider legalising the act of placing wagers on competitive video games.
Then-governor Wanda Vázquez Garced signed off on Senate Bill 1534, which standardises betting laws across traditional sports and esports, though it will fall to current incumbent Pedro Pierluisi to oversee its implementation.
The bill’s passing marks the first positive step in a two-year struggle to bring legal video game betting to the territory. Thus far, only a handful of US states have formally acknowledged and regulated esports betting. The Virgin Islands have certified some forms of gambling, but nothing beyond what Puerto Rico has already achieved.
Importantly, the bill’s wording specifically mentions esports alongside the standard fare, something rare among existing gambling legislation. The governor herself further emphasised the inclusion of esports in a statement given after the signing. “It’s a measure that paves the way for the esports and sports betting industries in Puerto Rico, and encourages businesses and jobs in this sector,” she said.
The clarification sets a new precedent for future betting laws in Puerto Rico and beyond.
In the summer of 2019, Puerto Rico approved House Resolution 2038, which allowed in-person and online betting on traditional sports, fantasy sports and esports.
However, the resolution only sanctioned betting on professional sports; it is still illegal to bet on amateur events. Since esports leagues work very differently from traditional sports, the terms “professional” and “amateur” have different applications that might not match up with the legal terms. That uncertainty has held back esports betting in the territory.
Several of the larger esports betting sites neglect Puerto Rico in their coverage. Many popular sites automatically disbar the United States, though Puerto Rico’s laws differ from the federal standard. Clearly, the lack of clarity in both the law and the definition of “professional” has significantly hampered the market.
The local landscape
Puerto Rico’s esports scene is largely folded into the general North American circuit. Puerto Rican players currently hold positions in multiple Overwatch League teams in addition to their solo player outings in Heroes of the Storm, League of Legends and Starcraft 2. Fighting games are also popular in the territory.
With local competition and international representatives, Puerto Rico has a lot of incentive to legalise esports betting.
While Senate Bill 1534 doesn’t fully legalise the activity, it does create some financial opportunities for both bettors and esports bookies in the territory.
For Puerto Rican bettors, this law paves the way for legislation that further recognises esports. Local officials claim that legalised esports betting could bring in up to $87m in tax revenue within the first five years of operation.
The governor’s statement also mentioned that thousands of jobs would be created to run the sector. There’s a lot of motivation to get bills written and passed, so expect the multi-year-long struggle to accelerate significantly in 2021.
Risk vs reward
Sportsbooks that do not operate in Puerto Rico or that only offer traditional sports should start assessing the opportunity cost of market entry. New betting legislation will be drafted throughout the year, so consider different political outcomes.
Bearing in mind the constitutional kerfuffle that put Wanda Vásquez into power in 2019, Governor Pierluisi might not share the same enthusiasm as his predecessor.
Then again, the post-Covid economic incentives might draw him towards legal esports betting.
While this bill paves the way for further regulation, the next few resolutions will set the tone for Puerto Rico’s path towards legalised gambling. There are plenty of financial opportunities on offer already, but branching out into the territory still isn’t straightforward.
But with the territory eager to adopt professional gaming, and with bookmakers able to use it as a test region for full United States coverage, esports betting executives should seriously consider expanding into Puerto Rico.
Through the agreement, Carousel’s flagship betting site will operate in New Jersey, Indiana and Iowa, with online casino also offered in New Jersey, pending obtaining all necessary gaming licenses.
Carousel said the agreement will increase its addressable market in the US from $109m to an estimated $1.8bn, with 24.5 million people residing in the target states. SportsBetting.com began operating in Colorado last year through a partnership with local licensee Johnny Nolon’s Casino.
Gadhia and Rigby will be replaced by Holly Koeppel and Nancy Dubuc as non-executive directors, with Dubuc stepping into the role from 29 April and Koeppel following on 13 May.
Nancy Dubuc has been chief executive of international media group Vice Media since 2018, and has held senior management positions, including chief executive, with A&E Television Networks between 1999 and 2018.
Holly Koeppel is currently non-executive director of British American Tobacco plc, coal mining and processing company Arch Resources Inc, and electric power distributor AES Corporation. She also holds the position of non-executive director of materials technology business Vesuvius plc until 12 May.
Previously, Koeppel was managing partner of the Gateway Infrastructure Fund from 2010 to 2017, and prior to this was chief financial officer of American Electric Power.
Commenting on the new appointments, Flutter Entertainment’s chair, Gary McGann, said: “Since the successful merger of Flutter and The Stars Group, we have mapped out a Board renewal programme over the coming years, having regard to the scale, geographic breadth and direction of travel of the business, in addition to enhanced gender balance and diversity.”
He said that as executive chair of The Stars Group, Dave Gadhia led the turnaround and subsequent strong growth of the operator. Gadhia was critical in seeing the opportunity for the merger with Flutter, and leaves a strong and enduring legacy, McGann said.
With regards to Peter Rigby, McGann said: “Peter has been a stalwart of the Betfair, Paddy Power and legacy Flutter boards during his seven years’ tenure as Director. He has made significant contributions to Flutter’s progress through his astute Chairing of the Risk Committee and subsequently the Remuneration Committee.
“I want to thank both Dave and Peter for their considerable commitment and good counsel and wish them health, happiness and success for the future.”
McGann said the appointment of Dubuc and Koeppel followed an international search as part of Flutter’s ongoing board renewal process, and that their presence on the board will add enormously to its diversity of thought and perspective.
Data collected by the Gambling Commission showed that overall participation among adults in any gambling activity in the year to the end of December had fallen to 42%, which was down five percentage points compared to the previous year.
Between 2019 and 2020, each gender and age category showed some level of decline in participation rates, with the sharpest drops among men and younger age groups.
While online gambling participation was up three percentage points to 24%, in-person participation was down nine percentage points to 26%.
National Lottery draws and other lotteries saw increases in online play and decreases in in-person play during the period. When respondents who had only taken part in National Lottery draws were excluded, the overall participation rate was down from 32% in 2019 to 28% in 2020.
In other activities, there were decreases in participation in in-person football pools, bingo, betting on horse races, betting on other events and casino games.
“The year to December 2020, which the data is based upon and reflects, has been an unique year; with the arrival of COVID-19,” a Gambling Commision spokesperson said.
“The various lockdown rules and restrictions throughout 2020 have brought about significant consumer behavioural change and clearly have also had a major impact on the gambling industry.
“Data shows that for all respondents, online gambling participation rates are increasing. When those who have only played National Lottery draws are removed from the data, the all respondents online participation rate has remained stable between 2019 and 2020.”
The data is based on the Gambling Commission’s quarterly telephone survey conducted by Yonder Consulting. A nationally representative sample of 4,007 adults aged 16 and over were interviewed via telephone in March, June, September and December 2020.
The Gambling Commission found that the overall problem gambling rate was 0.3%, compared to 0.6% the previous year, although it described this decrease as not “statistically significant”, meaning it could be explained by chance in more than 5% of scenarios.
The moderate risk rate was stable at 0.9%, while the low-risk rate showed a significant decrease from 2.7% to 2.0%.
The survey found that levels of agreement that gambling is conducted fairly and can be trusted have remained stable at 29%.
The Betting and Gaming Council (BGC) welcomed the drop in the problem gambling rate, vowing that the industry would “keep up the momentum” to reduce it further.
Wes Himes, the BGC’s executive director for standards and innovation, said: “Since being established in 2019, we have worked tirelessly to drive up standards in the regulated betting and gaming industry and promote safer gambling.
“Our initiatives have included encouraging deposit limits, investing more in research, education and treatment, and introducing tough new rules on VIP schemes and game design.
“One problem gambler is one too many, however, and we are determined to keep up the momentum in the months ahead.
“For example, we’re looking at how we extend filtering for online ads, and are working with online platforms on opt outs for betting advertising.
“We look forward to engaging with the Government’s Gambling Review to ensure a safer gambling environment for our millions of customers.”
There are three key components to chart success: distribution, penetration and game design. This article looks at distribution and specifically, indirect distribution, or how to expand your coverage via aggregators.
The more the merrier
“How do we get on operator Z’s site?” the boss or chairman asks? Uh oh, there’s that question again – slightly gentler than the more accusatory, “Why are we not on Z’s site?”, or “Why haven’t you done a deal with Z?”.
As there are zero incremental costs on gameplay, more distribution means a higher bottom line. The more (and bigger) sites your game appears on, the more turnover it generates, hence the obvious and predictable questions.
While you might entertain ambitions of hundreds of operator deals around the globe, this is a long haul. Operators have very little bandwidth for integrating new studio partners directly and getting to the top of an operator’s roadmap is a major hurdle for direct integrations.
You’re not only competing with other studios and aggregators (and operators will prioritise by size) but also payment processors, data feed suppliers, CRM tools, maintenance and upgrade projects and the raft of new compliance functionality that needs adding on a regular basis.
Melvin Ritsema, managing director of Royal Panda, says that operators can no longer cope with too many separate integrations. “Let’s be optimistic and say the integration of one game supplier is two weeks… [if you have] 50 suppliers for an operator, that’s 100 weeks of development, or two full years”, he told Casinobeats Malta Digital last year.
Data from Egamingmonitor.com reveals there are an average of 32 studios per operator, which implies at least a year’s worth of integration work, not to mention the ongoing maintenance and compliance implications of hosting so many partner feeds. In this context, the more traditional chain of studio/aggregator/operator may be making a comeback.
It’s no wonder that some studios, having integrated into a couple of operators, see the potential to act as aggregators for other studios that have been left out in the cold.
Most importantly, there is a close correlation between the number of aggregator deals and game distribution.
More aggregators = greater distribution
At Egamingmonitor, we have mapped out the complex relationships between 500 gaming studios to 350 aggregators and 1,000+ operators.
Here’s a top 10 chart of studios, ranked by the number of aggregator partners they have. The size of the aggregator partner ‘bubbles’ is a function of the total games they aggregate from all of their studio partners.
Microgaming tops the chart here, distributing its games to 91 platform providers or aggregators. Everymatrix, Oryx, White Hat, Alea, SoftSwiss and Iforium are some of the larger aggregators they distribute to, for example.
It’s no coincidence then that those studios with the most aggregator partners also feature strongly in overall game distribution – measured as the number of operator sites where their games appear. Five of the top 10 studios by number of aggregator partners are also in the top 10 by number of operators.
If we group studios under their gaming groups, the picture does change slightly, with the likes of Gauselmann, SG Digital and Playtech featuring higher in the charts. Note also that Microgaming’s 10 ‘independent’ studios are not grouped in this view either.
The scatter chart below shows first how our industry is characterised by many small studios with a handful of operator sites and aggregator partners. For the medium/larger companies there is a good correlation between the number of aggregators and the number of operator sites where games are distributed.
So if the objective is to achieve the broadest possible distribution within the shortest period of time, then the indirect route can deliver. In return for broad distribution and shared functionality, a studio will realise a lower percentage but of a far higher turnover.
Aggregator choices
Studios still need to get onto a product roadmap, that of the platform provider, but once integrated, the reach can be impressive. There is, of course, a difference between being listed as a partner and being fully integrated into an aggregator’s engine.
A full integration into the RGS takes longer as game components are often rebuilt on the aggregator’s platform, though this also means that studios benefit from shared functionality such as leader boards, tournaments and networked jackpots. This, in turn, means better uptake by operator clients of the distributor.
A closer look at the data can identify potential aggregator partners, with a preference perhaps for those that seem to achieve new studio integrations faster than average. The snapshot below from iGB’s interactive Casino Dashboard highlights the busiest aggregator dealmakers in recent months, for example.
Over the last six months, a total of 197 deals were announced between 70 aggregators and 120 studios, with BOG and PariPlay topping the charts with 10 deals each in the period.
Conversely, you could focus instead on those that partner with just a small number of studios, where your products will have more attention and take up more shelf space. Alternatively, you may want to filter the data by country, highlighting a geographic angle to your aggregator opportunities. If you prefer quality to quantity, you might focus on those serving Tier 1 rather than Tier 2 operators, and so forth.
Kevin Dale is the co-founder of eGamingMonitor. He was previously CEO of Gameaccount (now GAN plc) and CMO at Eurobet, Sportingbet and Betfair.Egamingmonitor.com is an advisory firm to the gambling industry, with proprietary data covering 30,000 games from 1,000 suppliers across 1,000 operator sites.
However, the business made a net loss of €254.6m as expenses declined more slowly than revenue amid land-based suspensions.
Full year operating revenue was down from €1.64bn in the full year 2019, a year which saw the company make an operating profit of €472.7m and a net loss of €6.7m.
In the fourth quarter of the year, the operator generated €211m in operating revenue, down from €537.6m in Q4 2019, and €51m in operating profit, down from a net operating profit of €53m in the previous year.
When venues were permitted to reopen, at different intervals depending on the local decrees of the different jurisdictions Cirsa operates in, the operator said the group managed to reduce the impact on revenue and results in spite of a large reduction in operating capacity.
The year provided 45% fewer productive hours than usual, it said, however its “Secure Gaming” plan allowed it to mitigate the impact of this and recover its customer base and income.
It also said the group’s solid financial structure allowed it to maintain high levels of liquidity throughout the year.
Its casino and bingo hall divisions were hit hard by closures across the globe, the operator said, but the Secure Gaming plan allowed it to return to a good level of activity in these when venues were allowed to reopen.
The time spent closed varied by jurisdiction, it pointed out, stating that while venues in Spain reopened for a period after just 86 days, the land-based sector remained closed in Panama for some 7 months and in Peru for around 9 months.
While slot machine revenue suffered significantly, the operator said the Manhattan and Pharaoh’s Gold games launched by its UNIDESA B2B subsidiary became the best performing slots on the market.
Its Sportium subsidiary, which mainly focuses on the Spanish retail betting market, maintained a good level of activity, it said, and the efficient management of resources helped maximise revenue and minimise costs throughout the year.
Cirsa said Sportium’s digital channel, which remained fully operational throughout the year, continued its progression towards significant growth rates.
The Borgata Casino features over 150 slots and table games, with players able to access content such as Premium Blackjack Pro and MGM Grand Millions.
BetMGM’s integration with the MGM Resorts’ M life Rewards program will also allow Borgata Casino players in Pennsylvania to redeem points from gameplay for at MGM Resorts properties across the US, such as the Bellagio and MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Borgata Casino becomes BetMGM’s second online casino in Pennsylvania, with the operator having launched its BetMGM Casino brand in December last year.
“There are few casino brands as well-respected as Borgata, evident by the success we’ve seen with the Borgata Casino app in New Jersey,” BetMGM chief executive Adam Greenblatt said.
