In this interview with CalvinAyre.com’s Becky Liggero, Stuart Trigwell of Global Bet explains why he thinks virtual sports is a real emerging market when it comes to sports betting industry.
There’s no point starting a debate on whether or not eSports is the future of gambling.
Pundits predict that in 2020, the number of eSports viewers will surge to 19.4 million viewers betting $23.5 billion to generate total industry revenues of $1.81 billion.
If the men and women from Juniper Research are to be believed, virtual reality gambling, on the other hand, will become a lucrative market as it is predicted to hit the US$520 million-mark by 2021.That figure is an 800 percent increase from $58.5 million last year.
Part of the success of the virtual reality gambling industry can be attributed to the popularity of virtual sports, which continues to grow and evolve. However, the unexpected success of the fantasy genre – League of Legends (LoL), Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO), and Dota 2 – has overshadowed the immense popularity of virtual sports.
Stuart Trigwell of Global Bet said virtual sports industry are coming up ways in order to make their presence felt in the industry. Part of the virtual sports’ so-called evolution, according to Trigwell, is by making the games more “life-like.”
He pointed out that virtual sports is becoming more and more important to operators and platform providers that developers “need to evolve.”
“I personally think that one of the parts in the industry that is growing and evolving the quickest as well. You can see how the games over the last couple of years and even now moving forward are starting to get more and more life-like,” he told CalvinAyre.com. “Customers like playing and they cater for all ages or different sorts of gamblers. You can play it whenever you want, like if you like to go and have a game now… you can just go online and start playing. Yeah it is an exciting time to be on virtual sports.”
One of the innovations that their company have taken, according to Trigwell, is to get athletes, spend a few days with them to get the key points in the games.
”We got some NBA players and we basically spent a few days with them, we got key points in the games. Basically, the game’s highlights that last about a minute is very important to capture all the key plan. It is a really good fun, it is fantastic to see them play. Yeah we do believe the game is as life-like as possible,” he explained. “Virtual sports is evolving. It’s becoming much bigger piece of product profile of the gaming companies so we want to produce a game that is as life-like to the real thing as possible. We had hundreds and hundreds of hours of motion capture with video basketball players using 3D animation, we believe we provide the game now that is close to the real thing as possible.”
