Online lifeline

May 11, 2020 1:45 PM
  • Frank Legato, CDC Gaming Reports
May 11, 2020 1:45 PM
  • Frank Legato, CDC Gaming Reports

With casinos shut down across the world due to the COVID-19 pandemic, online casino games are stepping up to fill the void—and provide a revenue lifeline for operators

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The industrywide shutdown due to the coronavirus pandemic has presented unprecedented challenges to suppliers charged with developing and delivering slot machines and table games to idle customers. But there is one segment of the gaming supply sector that has actually gotten stronger during the pandemic: online gaming.

The online casinos of New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware, soon likely to be joined by other states currently considering legalization, are seizing the opportunity to offer games to gamblers who can’t go to casinos. Consequently, slot suppliers are ramping up their libraries of online games.

Smaller gaming suppliers like Everi Holdings and AGS were already in growth mode online before the pandemic hit. Both manufacturers have relatively young interactive divisions, and the shutdown of physical, land-based gaming has accelerated their drive into the market.

“Everi continues to expand the number of online, real-money casino sites where we have our content available in New Jersey and Pennsylvania,” said David Lucchese, executive vice president of sales, marketing and digital for Everi. “As of today, our games are found on 11 sites between New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and we expect we’ll be in three more in Pennsylvania, and five or six more in New Jersey, by the end of the year.”

Everi games have been on real-money sites in New Jersey for two years, and prior to the pandemic, the company was expanding that with its proprietary remote game server, augmenting games offered through third-party partners like Spin Games and GameAccount Network (GAN). “We’re still supporting both our RGS and the other third-party partners we have,” Lucchese said, “but we are leaning more into the (proprietary) RGS, because we can control that pipeline better.”

Since the shutdown began, that pipeline has been busy indeed. There are currently 30 titles live, with 50 approved in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. “We expect that by the end of the year, we’ll be able to double those numbers,” Lucchese said. “We’ve been able to bring over our land-based products, which are Everi’s intellectual property. We have some great games the players know and recognize from the land-based side, and certainly now we have more players transitioning to online to get their enjoyment from casino games.”

Lucchese adds that Everi also is expanding the online footprint of its licensed games, the first of which were Penn & Teller and Zoltar Speaks, both launched last year.

AGS’ Golden Wins

“Just recently, we extended our intellectual property license agreement with the Discovery Channel on Shark Week. So we now have the online rights to Shark Week, one of our big hits from 2019 into 2020 on the land-based side,” he said. “We’re fast-tracking the development of that game and launching it with our casino partners for online/real-money. That’s pretty exciting.”

Lucchese says the most popular Everi Games online are the same ones that have been most successful in casinos. “Titles like The Comet Meltdown, Double Ruby, Cash Machine, Smokin’ 777, and the licensed title Zoltar Speaks have all been top hits for us,” he said.

Continuing Effort

Like Everi, gaming supplier AGS was already busy increasing its online footprint when COVID-19 hit.

“Before COVID-19 started to spread across the globe, AGS was already focused on finding ways to distribute our land-based games online,” Matt Reback, executive vice president of AGS, said. “In mid-2018, we acquired an aggregation platform from a company called Gameiom Technologies: the intent behind that was to give us a platform on which we could develop our land-based games and then distribute those to online operators in regulated markets around the world. So, we were in full swing executing on that (before the pandemic).”

Reback said AGS found great success in translating its land-based successes to online play. “We were having success in seeing that our content, which performs very well land-based, translated well online,” he said. “And the positive news there was that we were getting distribution to all the Tier 1 Gibraltar operators, we were distributing through Malta, and we were just starting to penetrate New Jersey.

“There were some questions about whether AGS’ games would translate well into markets where they didn’t have a land-based presence. What we saw was that they did, in fact, outperform some organic online content, and that the games were just as strong online as they are in retail casinos, even in markets where they didn’t have a land-based presence – in Europe, for example. So we (were) busy expanding, continuing to scale the distribution, leading right up to the COVID-19 pandemic.”

AGS’ Rakin’ Bacon

AGS games are currently on five New Jersey internet gaming sites, a number which is growing rapidly. “We continue to go live regularly with more and more of them,” Reback said. “At the time COVID hit, somewhere around early or mid-March, we were live with two or three New Jersey operators. We were certainly live with Rush Street and Golden Nugget, and in March we went live with Caesars, and we’re live with Resorts/Mohegan. And we’ve got another six operators that are pending going live as they go through the review process with the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement.”

AGS also has developed a proprietary RGS, which it uses for both real-money and social games. But the supplier also serves as an aggregator for other content suppliers. “We distribute games for Gaming Realms, Storm, High Five, Ainsworth, Inspired—just a variety of really quality third-party suppliers,” Reback said. “We will continue to distribute those third-party games where there is demand, and there continues to be strong demand. In addition, side-by-side, we are distributing AGS games from our real-money RGS.

“On the social side, we are a B2C provider, with Lucky Play Casino. We also have a few B2B social casinos we support for our casino partners; we’re operating their social casinos. And then we also offer our games via a social RGS to some other third-party operators and social casinos, where there is demand for AGS content in a social environment.”

As with Everi, land-based success has led to online success. “Our Nos. 1, 2 and 3 best-performing games in real-money gaming are Fu Nan Fu Nu, Golden Wins and Rakin’ Bacon!,” said Reback. “Those titles should sound familiar, because they have been at the top of the Eilers performance list for quite some time.”

AGS currently has 13 games live in the real-money environment, and as with other suppliers, that number is growing quickly. “We’re putting out a new game every three weeks now,” said Reback. “We continue to see success; we hear feedback from folks like William Hill, GVC, Ladbrokes, Rush Street, Caesars and Golden Nugget, that when we launch an AGS game, it typically is one of their stronger game launches.”

Staying the Course

For larger slot suppliers like Konami Gaming, IGT and Scientific Games, the shutdown has shown the value of well-developed interactive divisions.

Konami boasts a robust remote game server that integrates with most popular back-end systems used by online gaming operators, in what the company calls a “complete interactive gaming solution.”

“Konami’s long-held focus is on empowering operators with proven game content across a mix of platforms, from traditional land-based to online for-wager,” said Jay Bertsch, senior vice president of North American game and global systems sales for Konami. “We’ve seen Konami games achieve considerable success on social and real-money online gaming for many different operators across North America.”

Predictably, the best-performing Konami games in land-based casinos have repeated their success online. “By distributing popular Konami casino games like China Shores, Lotus Land and Chili Chili Fire through the RGS, operators can easily integrate Konami games into their online gaming sites and apps,” Bertsch said. “All the games on our RGS are developed using HTML5 and are available for both mobile and desktop. We also have agreements with online gaming operators like GameAccount Network and PlayStudios, wherein we have licensed our game content to them for distribution.”

Bertsch adds that Konami’s Synkros casino management system offers a real-time interface that allows operators to treat online players the same way they treat those who visit their land-based properties. “This allows casinos with both land-based and online operations to create a single view of the player by accessing a single player loyalty account, tracking play, managing point redemption, and enabling channel-agnostic marketing,” he explained.

Like Konami, IGT is riding the COVID crisis with a well-established interactive division in IGT PlayDigital. “During this period of land-based casino closures, many of our customers have reported increased play on their online platforms, and have engaged with us in meaningful dialogue about what thriving in the ‘the new normal’ means to them,” said Enrico Drago, senior vice president of IGT PlayDigital. “Many of these conversations are rooted in diversifying content delivery methods and expanding access to digital gaming.”

Players familiar with the most famous IGT land-based games are likely to find them more easily online these days. “In terms of exciting content, we continue to launch innovative digital products across the portfolio,” said Drago. “Earlier this month, IGT PlayDigital launched Cleopatra Gold, the evolution of the very popular Cleopatra title, via our PlayRGS, and performance is very strong. It was our most anticipated launch of the year, and it happened to launch at a time when many people were sheltering in place.

“Similarly in the U.K., we’ll soon be launching our Tournaments Feature with a prominent online operator. On May 1, Colorado will open its mobile-friendly sports betting market, and our PlaySports platform will be deployed and powering mobile wagering across the state. In addition to these new deployments, we’ve continued to entertain more than 30,000 active users across Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and tens of thousands more across Canada with our world-class online game content.”

Meanwhile, online play continues to grow as the pandemic shutdown stretches on. “What we’re seeing,” said Reback at AGS, “when we look at industrywide analytics and operator reports, is that when folks want to gamble in a regulated market like New Jersey or Pennsylvania or Europe, and their casinos are shut down on the land-based side, some play is migrating over to online. Quantifying that for AGS is challenging, since we were in growth mode already. However, we certainly assume we are seeing some increase in play online, versus the play levels before COVID-19.”

Online Boost to Continue

If the industrywide shutdown has done anything, it has given online gaming in the U.S. a boost that is likely to continue after the land-based industry ramps back up once the pandemic has passed.

“We are pleasantly surprised that we’ve launched a couple of games that were good performers, but not maybe A-plus performers in land-based, that are actually performing better online than in land-based,” said Everi’s Lucchese. “They are outperforming our expectations, and we think that’s a tribute to great math and great artwork that are translating well into a mobile device.”

“We really haven’t changed anything we were doing, because we were just entering these (online) markets, and we were ramping up anyway,” said Reback at AGS. “And the way I look at is, if you’re sprinting, you can sprint so fast, and you just keep sprinting. We were new to the markets; we were adding new operators, and the games were performing. So we continue to beef up our library, and continue to execute.”

AGS has another advantage over some suppliers in that it has a fully developed table-games division. According to Reback, the company is currently looking at adding digital versions of specialty poker games like Chase the Flush (which it could provide in the poker-only Nevada iGaming market) and other proprietary table games, like the popular Buster Blackjack, that have seen success across the U.S. “We are currently working on a plan to bring our best table games to the online environment, whether that’s poker in a market like Nevada, or table games in markets like Pennsylvania or New Jersey, where real-money (online) table games perform very well,” he said.

“We look at ourselves as a provider of world-class content in any gaming environment, whether it’s social or online or land-based. So, our job is really to find ways to make that content available to anybody in a regulated environment who wants it. As new states do come on line, we’re set up to do that. We’ve got quite a bit of runway to grow into, and we’re going to continue to work with those jurisdictions to make sure we are licensed, that those games are up and running, and players in those markets can play our games online.”

“The IGT PlayDigital team continues to deliver performance-driving products and services that can help fuel our customers’ growth,” said IGT’s Drago. “Together with our customers we’re evaluating current business opportunities and challenges, and defining the path forward.”