A word from ExCeL

There’s something oddly appropriate about ICE taking place just a week after Groundhog Day. Walking into the cavernous halls of the Excel there’s an overwhelming sense of déjà vu: the same faces saying the same things at the same stands. “Meet you at the Microgaming bar at 3pm,” is the usual industry cry to pick up the conversations begun a few years ago, but the chatter this year felt very different. Muted, perhaps. The whole conference was redolent of an industry uncertain of what it wants to be next.

Perception is everything at a major conference, and events like ICE are all about how you want to be seen to the outside world. What is the image you want to present about yourself and your business? It’s about showing who you want to be, ideally via a 4m high definition screen surrounded by some obscenely expensive staging and models in fancy dress. And as such it’s always interesting to note the subtle differences from year to year at the major stands.

Playtech’s stand felt a little less giant than in some years, perhaps due to the continued expansion of some of its rivals, not least SBTech. But what was on show was a fascinating insight into the changing nature of this business. While all areas of the industry were covered on the stand, sports and live casino appeared to be pushed more to the front. Sports in particular had a strong retail and US feel about the presentation with banks of screens showing US odds and virtual basketball at one point.

Solving the industry’s problems

And beyond Playtech what was immediately striking about this year’s ICE was the dominant role played by the sports betting sector. A huge area of the show’s floor space was given over to a seemingly endless array of sports betting suppliers from a truly diverse range of nations. Everyone, it now seems, is a sportsbook platform supplier.

Retail and mobile solutions from the Italian, Austrian, French, German, Asian, East European and naturally the UK were all competing to be the “leading sports betting” platform with varying degrees of plausibility. It’s clear a large segment of the egaming sector believes sports will be the panacea to all ills over the next few years, with many an eye fixed on the nascent US market. And there remains a number of opportunities for suppliers around the margins from data, to virtuals to new products aimed at streamlining trading or capturing more share of wallet.

Sports is where it’s at in 2019, with casino playing a more secondary role. It’s where the stable growth is somewhat oddly perceived to be, and this year stability is everything.

The regulatory pushback the industry has seen throughout 2018 has no doubt left this sector a little unsure of itself. European markets don’t appear to be full of endless growth opportunities anymore and both operators and suppliers are looking elsewhere for opportunities in 2019. Grey markets are the new regulated markets in the eyes of some key investors, analysts and advisors and it’s possible this existing conceit changed the view on the show, but it felt like there was an even larger representation of firms both from, and targeting, the Asian market.

How easily some of the big firms can capitalise on this, however, remains to be seen and what may be more interesting is how much opportunity is open for the big Asian-facing firms to use some of their capital to invest back into the European markets.

Where next for Europe?

For the European sector things felt a little less exciting. The need to be seen to acting responsibly has perhaps taken a little froth of the sector and outside of some exuberance in sports the whole thing felt a little muted. But it was more than just an issue of presentation. There was less of a feeling of pushing the boundaries, a little less innovation and a little more platform. Casino in particular seems to be dividing up into large platform distributors and an ever growing band of smaller content houses feeding into them, while the lifespan of a hot content house seems to be getting ever shorter.

It all adds to that sense of an industry uncertain of its future potential, resistant to too much radical change and not quite yet on top of the shifting market dynamics. Regulators, legislators, the media, the wider technology sector and not least the financial sector are all pushing and pulling gambling in varying directions, but in many ways the business remains much the same as it ever was and that is creating some uncertainty about exactly where it goes next. To mangle a French saying, perhaps the more things stay the same the more they change. Groundhog day, after all, is just a myth.