It’s official. Public gaming companies are selfish crybabies. It’s hard to believe that with a scandal besmirching the sport of cricket — and simultaneously dealing a dagger-blow to the heart of a nation already struggling under the weight of an unprecedented natural disaster — it’s public gaming companies who are crying ‘woe is us’. Like a teenage girl who gets a big beaming zit on her nose the morning of her junior prom, public gaming companies who were hoping to look their best for prospective dance partners are now lying in a heap on their bedroom floor, sobbing their eyes out.
Take the case of 888.com, last seen bleeding money and shedding staff like so many unwanted pounds in an effort to fit into the prom dress it bought earlier this year. 888 knows that the merger mania gripping the industry is almost entirely predicated on the prospect of legal online gaming coming to the US market in the not too distant future. Anything that might cause the moral watchdogs of the American right to point the finger of scorn at online gaming – like, say, a highly publicized sports corruption story – might set those prospects back a good long while, if not indefinitely. And then 888 will have to stay home, in front of the TV, eating bon-bons, getting fatter and dreaming of what might have been. Read more.
