Breaking News: Bally buys Chili's iGaming platform
Golden Nugget remains on the B2B platform after signing up earlier this month.
US slots and casino management company Bally Technologies has agreed a deal to acquire Chiligaming’s B2B ‘igaming platform’ for an undisclosed amount.
The platform, which signed up the Golden Nugget casino as its first customer earlier this month, will allow land-based casinos to customise their online operations using a cloud-based system offering ‘best-of-breed’ products from a variety of providers.
A number of Chili employees will continue to work on the platform, joining Bally’s newly launched interactive arm and provide the Las Vegas-based company with knowledge and expertise developed during its interactions with software providers in the company’s seven years as an operator.
Golden Nugget’s position remains unaffected by the acquisition, and Chiligaming CEO Alex Dreyfus (pictured) told eGaming Review that he hopes more customers will be announced in the coming weeks and months.
Dreyfus revealed that talks between Chiligaming and Bally had been going on for more than a month, explaining: “I came to meet them with a view to setting up a partnership with them and to see what other opportunities there were, and I came out of the meeting with a very good feeling.
“We realised if we wanted to be even more successful in the US, which is a key and a very challenging market with a lot of licensing issues, it would make more sense for us to join forces in order to become bigger and stronger in this way rather than doing it all ourselves,” he added.
Bally has already applied for a licence in Nevada, and could shortly get the green light in the Silver State. It holds land-based gambling licences in the majority of the 50 United States.
The company recently also acquired a remote gaming server, and followed the 2011 purchase with mobile developer MacroView Labs with the expansion of its mobile games library earlier this month.
Dreyfus considers the acquisition a “game-changer” which will “[P]osition Bally as a real leading online gaming provider in the US”.
“Most if not all of the other companies that casinos are in talks with are offering a full vertical product, without an open architecture, so when you sign with one provider you can’t add software from any other.
“What we’re offering allows them to have a similar situation online as they have in their [brick and mortar] casinos, where they don’t just have products from one provider but thousands of different slots or table games providers which are all connected to one gaming system,” he added.
Bryan Kelly, Bally’s senior vice president of technology, noted that “The design of our iGaming platform is that it is cloud-based, open, and interoperable, which means that our casino customers will have the ability to choose best-of-breed poker, slot, and table products to use in conjunction with the platform, while having a deep integration with our proven Bally land-based systems.”
As well as offering customers the opportunity to pick and choose software from a variety of pre-selected providers, the platform will be tailored to each individual state based on regulatory requirements.
“In Nevada you will only be able to plug poker into the system, whereas in New Jersey there might be the option of bingo or sports betting, depending on what is allowed,” Dreyfus explained.
As well as providing on-ground expertise in Nevada, Chiligaming will be able to offer professional services such as marketing and affiliate programmes to Bally’s customers, helping them get their online operations up and running.
The acquisition does not cover any of Chili’s European-facing B2C assets, where the operator’s poker offering sits on Playtech’s iPoker network.