Esports Entertainment Group
(EEG) CTO John Brackens has made a name for esports industry. Brackens has built a reputation as a passionate advocate of the benefits of esports for the gambling industry. He took some time out to sit down with our very own Becky Liggero Fontana to talk about how the esports is leading the revival for the gambling industry.
The last 12 months have been a watershed moment for the esports industry with professional sports leagues going into hiatus because of the pandemic. While some gaming operators saw a crisis, Brackens saw this as an opportunity for the esports industry to step into the spotlight. “With COVID pretty much shutting down a huge percentage of the world and most traditional sports, esports was the only game in town from a betting perspective.”
There’s been a surge in interest in the esports industry. “We’ve seen a huge uptick in traffic and people visiting our site learning more about the different games that we offer in different markets,” Brackens said.
Gambling operators have historically been wary of the esports phenomenon, and the shift in the market has meant that operators are now seeing it as a new opportunity to attract a younger audience. Brackens believes that the millennial audience will be the go-to audience for betting operators for some time to come yet. “We’ve kind of tapped into a very up-and-coming niche here and that it’s going to last us throughout and fix forward.”
Brackens believes that the beauty of esports is its ability to capture an audience with an interest in immersive gaming. “The younger generation doesn’t grow out of CS:GO and League of Legends, they just continue playing it.”
According to Brackens, the next evolution for the esports industry will be embracing the full potential of blockchain and betting markets. “When it comes to online gambling right, the words online gambling and innovation typically don’t go hand in hand, or at least in the same sentence. But blockchain is innovation, it’s a revolutionary technology and if you stop to think about it, it really can solve many of the problems that people face in the online gambling environment today,” Brackens said.
According to Brackens the ability of a younger audience to embrace new technology will lead to further innovations with esports and the gambling industry. “Blockchain can really solve a lot of those problems. The transparency of it, the immutability of it, it can do a massive volume of transactions at a fraction of the cost. I mean that’s something that can serve a lot of different industries obviously but particularly the online gambling industry.”
Brackens elaborated further on how this could benefit the world of esports, as younger audiences have shown more of a willingness to embrace new technology. Blockchain allows you to do smaller micro-transactions, smaller bets and allows for the odds to verified and validated.
In the full interview, Brackens goes further to describe some of the innovation we can expect to see in 2021, as the gambling industry looks to develop the relationship further with the esports industry. Brackens was one of the speakers at the 2020 CoinGeek Conference exploring the innovations of blockchain in the esports industry. You can recap the roundtable here.
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