In this interview with CalvinAyre.com’s Stephanie Raquel, Richard Moore of Pinnacle shares how betting operators may be able to capitalize on the popularity of eSports.
eSports continues to see exponential growth over the past few years as its viewership becomes 20 times larger than its player base. Gaming and financial analysts predict that the competitive gaming sector, which is valued at $1.5 billion in 2017, will grow 26 percent by 2020.
The success of eSports has begun to attract not only mainstream audiences but also gambling operators who are looking for new revenue streams.
“[eSports] is a huge industry. It is growing very quickly. An independent report put eSports at $1.5 billion last year. It is set to grow bigger. There are franchising leads happening,” Richard Moore of Pinnacle told CalvinAyre.com.
The only challenge that operators may face coming in to eSports is that many of its audiences do not come from or have a traditional betting background, according to Moore.
Moore pointed out that operators need to take a more educational approach on these audiences in order to translate it to revenues. In the case of Pinnacle, Moore said that they walk audiences through experience.
“We need to take a more educational approach here. What we’re doing at Pinnacle is we have a dedicated eSports hub, and we have dedicated articles, which not only talk about the games and the news that is happening in the games, but also introduce people to the basics of betting,” the Pinnacle executive explained. “So, we’re walking them through experience. We almost got a kind of sub-brand for them. We have a separate Twitter feed for eSports players. A separate landing area and a site where eSports redirects to.”
Moore noted that they also extend help to operators who are interested to venture into eSports by working on their B2B solutions. He said that the company is now able to offer its eSports lines as a white label offering—either combined with sportsbook or separate on its own.
“eSports is trending very strong to us. It is now our sixth biggest sport so it is major for us. We’ve seen a very familiar trend in the industry which is live betting—just in general—around sports,” Moore said. “It kind of goes hand in hand with the improvement of information services, coming in with reduced latency and things like that.”
