The slow death of commoditisation

The annual EGR B2B awards shortlist was announced this week and at first glance it’s repudiation of the status quo in the egaming sector with Playtech, Microgaming and NetEnt dominating the nominations. But dig a little deeper and it’s clear the hegemony of the past is under significant threat.

What’s perhaps most obvious is the sheer volume of content suppliers currently serving the market. Anyone who’s looked at an online casino site in the past 12 months will know there is no shortage of slots providers at the moment. The Slots category features plenty of the familiar faces, but also highlights some of the fast growing disruptors such as ELK, Red Tiger and Yggdrasil.

And they are far from the only ones changing the look of online casino in 2017 with a new slots provider seemingly appearing on a monthly basis. There is also the in-house content teams from Paddy Power Betfair, Ladbrokes Coral and Sky Betting & Gaming to consider. The uniformity and consistency of online casino offerings is beginning to change.

Exclusive games are nothing new, but the sheer volume of content available to operators now, along with more effective personalisation tools, means the commoditised product customers are used to may, just, be starting to fade into history. And it’s the B2B sector as much as the operators who are driving this development.

Plug and play
Increasingly innovative suppliers along with the modular nature of modern platforms is allowing operators to trial new products in all verticals, not just slots. In the sports betting sector we have seen the emergence of the likes of Colossus, Metric Gaming and a slew of virtual sports suppliers and more traditional products serving niche markets such as esports.

We’re seeing a truly diverse and differentiated offering available to operators, which, along with considerable in-house development, is starting to show on the consumer-facing offering. There is a certain degree of uniformity in both sports betting and casino, but it’s no longer the case that consumers are offered the choice of the red, blue or green one. Whisper it quietly, but we may be seeing the slow death of commoditisation in the sector.

What is driving this is a focus on in-house development, more flexible offerings from the major suppliers and a new breed of B2B providers. A glance at the RNG Casino Supplier category shows the aforementioned big three competing with Iforium, OMI, Pragmatic Play and Leander Games among others. While the flagship Platform of the Year category is stuffed with some of the newer entrants to the market including Bede, iGaming Cloud, Gaming1, Aspire Global and SBTech.

These new modular, flexible platforms are changing the game for new operators in particular. As Olof Orm from online casino firm Dunder said in a recent interview with EGR, the new platforms allow operators to ignore “hygiene” factors and focus on the customer experience. “We don’t have to worry about payments, we don’t have to worry about a bonus engine and we don’t have to care about ensuring a 99% stable platform. We can just focus on creating a great customer experience.”

It’s not just the newer providers such as Bede and iGaming Cloud offering this flexibility either. Playtech, NYX, Microgaming and NetEnt are all at the forefront of this shift. It’s an industry-wide move that is placing the role of B2B suppliers far more in the background than in the past and providing operators with an opportunity to innovate and experiment with a capex at a fraction of what it would have historically cost them.

A changing of the guard
The net impact of modern, modular platforms from both new providers and the old-guard, and the addition of innovative and diverse content, has been significant on the industry. Operators are able to focus on marketing, UX and the creation of a real customer experience and a differentiated identity that’s driven as much by product as brand. “Product is the new brand,” as Orm says.

But before we get carried away it’s clearly still very early days. Even among the diverse and differentiated online casino operators you still see the same core games such as Starburst and Rainbow Riches. And with breakout content there is still only a brief window of differentiation before either the same games or very similar content appears on every major operator. The growth of Blueprint in the UK sector is testament to that.

There is a sense, however, we’re beginning to reach a tipping point due simply to the volume of content and the number of differentiated platforms available. With the reduced screen real estate on mobile operators can’t simply offer 20 slots suppliers, four virtual sports solutions, half a dozen in-play add-ons and a handful of lotto and scratchcard games to their customers at one time.

An element of curation either through a brand or product-driven strategy or data-driven personalisation is not just useful, but essential in the coming years. And there is every sign the B2B side of the sector will continue to supply the tools and the products to enable operators to stand-out in an ever more crowded market place.

The question is will the industry want to move away from the me-too philosophy that has sustained growth for so long? At the moment the answer seems to be a tentative yes and the continued growth and diversity in the B2B sector is a very positive indicator that the death of commoditisation may, finally, be on the horizon.