F E A T U R E TA L K I N G P O I N T S
Q&A
eGR: When are we going to start seeing growth in mobile casino? SA: Technological improvements are going to speed up amazingly in 2013 so we will see a big change in consumer behaviour along CONTINUED > with that. Summer 2013 will start the changeover for casino. It has started, but not in the same numbers as sports betting, and by 2014/15 the players will be using their tablets or smart phones to make any type of bet more often than on the PC. eGR: How is mobile going to change consumer behaviour? SA: Even at home I would rather pick up my iPhone or the iPad next to me than walk two meters to my PC machine. Wherever you go as soon as the device is personal it will allow you to play, whereas before it was only at your desk or very speci?c places. You can be on the beach and make a bet. It's a considerable revolution and it will not cannibalise the market – it will grow the market. eGR: Where do you see the big changes in technology? SA: The big change the industry will see in the future is the ability to offer players a continuous gaming experience where all their game history and money is recorded and captured in a single platform. This will allow players to navigate between mediums and types of bets and games where they can continue a desktop game on mobile or TV platforms and vice versa. This means players will be able to make a bet on a football game and the next minute take a roulette spin or join a poker table for a few minutes. Combined with a centralised management system such as Playtech’s IMS this de?nitely changes the way the industry operates. As Playtech’s IMS monitors the entire player lifecycle across all games and platforms including one wallet, it enables cross selling opportunities and customer behaviour analytics that are second to none. All of this increases signi?cantly the time a player spends on gaming and betting. In the coming few weeks we will complete a big project with one of our licensees to connect their betting shops with their online games. Players will be able to place a bet on a video terminal and have their winnings paid into their online account. eGR: How signi?cant will this be for operators? SA: This will be extremely signi?cant to operators as they enhance the convenience and accessibility of their games for their players, which will result in a superior gaming experience. As the accessibility of the games grow, operators will also be able to reach a larger market of potential new customers while increasing their cross selling opportunities to existing customers. I think this will generate so much more in terms of revenue for the operators as it allows them to handle bonusing, loyalty and CRM in a much smarter way. It won't be easy, but two years down the line this is going to be a big impact on the industry. eGR: How big an impact will social gaming have on the real-money casino sector? SA: Social by itself has not proven to successfully move players to real money or vice versa. At this point, there is very little signi?cant convergence, but if you look forward you
can take some of the social features and enhance the realmoney players’ experience. This is especially true in bingo or poker where there is a network and the game is more social in nature. It's all about the player experience and some of that will include social. We have a clear plan of what we want to do with social. I can't share the details at the moment, but the product needs to be different for social players than for realmoney players. eGR: Is the download casino dead? SA: We de?nitely see download becoming less and less signi?cant and web becoming more and more present, but I'm not sure it's going to be zero from the download side. Mobile is also downloadable, when you go to the app store and download the native app that is counted as a download. Over the long term, the download customers are going to be replaced by that. Flash is at some point going to cease to be important, and even on the PC we are going to run HTML5. Looking forward, we take HTML5 as our web version and make sure our Android and iPhone users have a download version. For PC download, it's going to be minimal in Europe. eGR: How can operators cope with the constantly changing demands of technology? SA: Devices are moving at an amazing pace. There is a new one coming out every few months that is revolutionary, but the majority are going to work on Android or iOS and they are all going to work with HTML5. So we are seeing the technology consolidating. Playtech constantly invests in investigating the new technologies and in new platforms that will help its licensees cope with the rapidly changing technology and will integrate with new game features. Two years ago we invested heavily on building a core product that will be more adaptive to any new technology coming out. And now we are seeing the bene?ts of that. Even if something comes out in a new language, we will have a much shorter route to market than before. eGR: How much potential does live gaming have in Europe? SA: If you go to the Far East, you see things that are less common here. Live gaming is a lot more common there than in Europe and is the dominant product in the Far East. Europe won't see the same volume, but we will see live products getting more and more revenue. We have seen the product improve amazingly in the past few years and the players are enjoying playing it more. eGR: How do you see the European regulated market developing? SA: There has to be some sort of consolidation. Playtech is present in all regulated countries in Europe. As such, this gives us a unique point of view where one of the important things we see is that new countries which are looking to develop regulation will choose regulations that proved successful in other countries. The trend we are looking at is that all the regulated markets might begin with sports betting, Bingo and poker tournaments, and then move to cash gam ????????????????????????????????Q???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????()???????????????((??((0