Without sports, many iGaming operators have seen a huge chunk of their revenue fall off significantly. Thankfully, other verticals are doing better than ever, and off of moderating a panel at the successful SBC Digital Summit, CalvinAyre.com’s Becky Liggero Fontana reached out to fellow moderator Ebbe Groes, CEO of EveryMatrix, to talk about options that are thriving.
While the newer products get a lot of the spotlight, Groes began by talking about an older, solidly consistent performer. “It’s a broad variation, variety of things that you can offer, but the biggest thing, and not mentioned too much, is actually casino,” he said. “Almost everyone has casino, and it’s a very large business area for us, and it’s really where we see a big, big difference, whether you have a good modern casino product or not.”
But that’s not to say that some newer products aren’t suddenly performing well. “Look at more sports related things, then it’s the esports that really stands out,” he said. “We’ve also done some things in in virtual sports, but really, the closer you get to sports, then you say the more the esports offering matters.”
Unfortunately though, Groes is worried that some sites just aren’t find a product that works. “The ability of various operators to really come up with a good offering is embarrassing, honestly, and I think their results will vary accordingly.”
One of the surprising things about esports sudden rise has been the games that have taken the majority of betting. “Traditional esports titles are very foreign to the normal sports product,” Groes said. “FIFA and NBA2K, on the other hand, are completely identical. The pick-up has been enormous. Last week, we had more than 50% of the trading was on esports, that that is just incredible. We started less than 1% before the virus again, so it’s not just all of the other sports that are dropping, the esports are drawing and they’re growing enormously.”
With the NBA2K and FIFA esports offerings taking 90% of the action, Fontana Liggero asked if these products could maintain their popularity when live sports returns. “I think it will stay and it will add just another variation of sports betting,” Groes answered. “People, once they’re used to this, they will see some attractive parts of esports that they will not get when they go back to betting on let’s say more obscure football or tennis or basketball.”
The other surprising new product to take a big part of the action has been virtual sports. While Groes thinks it has its audience, he’s still unsure if it can maintain its current momentum. “I think it does fit better to an audience which has retail as a large part of their offering,” he said. “So what we’ve seen is that for operators that are purely functioning online, then virtual sports is not really contributing much. Yes it adds extra, and it does have an effect, but esports is much more interesting. When it comes to operators that have a large retail presence, then it’s a different matter. They’ve already been exposed to it, they know about watching the dogs in the betting shop, and so on, dogs or horses or other such products, so here getting a product in front of this audience, yeah that can work, but really for a pure online sportsbook, I do not think it’s a great product.”
