iGB North America magazine IGBNA Aug/Sep | Page 29

Feature

“There is zero indication that the online games
have diminished sales of other games.”
themselves from playing the online games.
They may choose to exclude themselves
for one month, three months, or six
months. They also may exclude themselves
permanently. As I noted, no other form of
gaming in Michigan offers such responsible
gaming safeguards.
We also have a contact center that we
started for this. They handle phone calls,
emails and live online chats, and those folks
have been trained to deal with situations
when they hear players saying things such as:
“I’m spending a lot on that. And boy, I didn’t
realize how much I had been spending”. That’s
when we have protocols established, and our
contact center personnel will say: “Perhaps you
should take a break. Take this option, maybe
do that.” Players may already be thinking this
in the back of their mind, “Boy, I need to do
something differently here”, but these folks
can help them take that next step, “I’m going to
do something different here”, I’m going to self
exclude, take a break for six months.”
We have those safeguards in place, and we
can help people there. That is our philosophy,
being ready to help folks if they start to
indicate they might have a problem, explore
that with them.
The personnel in our contact center are
not counsellors, but they provide as much

information to the player as they can, and let
them make that decision.
How do the demographics of the
average online player compare with
those from the retail environment?
On the demographics, what we’re seeing is
that desktop players skew more toward 45+
females (our first $1 million online games
winner would be in this category) while the
mobile users are more male.
The 18-35 demographic is still a minority
segment for online games. We are seeing
stronger participation from this group vs.
retail, specifically in mobile. We also see that
the players who play through mobile devices
tend to be younger. Our average wagers per
week via this channel are about $2.5m, with
average wins totalling about $2.2m.
You reportedly projected to generate
$480m in online sales during the first
eight years. In light of the strong start
to the online project, will you now be
revising that upwards?
No that’s still the projection. Again, we weren’t
quite sure how things would go, and there
were some numbers crunched, as obviously
we had to go to the Governor