Egaming industry predictions for 2017 - part 12

Harry Lang, marketing director, Pinnacle

eSports – This is no longer a fad vertical. eSports is now firmly established as one of Pinnacle’s highest volume markets (recently passing hockey) and from the buzz I hear from teams, players and the likes of Twitch, the eSports betting industry hasn’t even shown a glimpse of its true potential yet. Add to that the clampdown of skin betting sites by Valve. It’s going to be fascinating to see some of the more slow moving operators crack open their wallets to try and catch up with the likes of Betway, Unikrn, Sky Bet and ourselves – so expect some huge sponsorships, big budget TV ads and some significant missteps as everyone tries to capture the zeitgeist.

Value – The so-called ‘race to the bottom’ with welcome and retention bonuses has been much discussed this year. It seems commonly agreed that this kind of loss-leading strategy is unsustainable, and yet operators need to find ways to differentiate and attract new customers. The most obvious way is to offer greater betting value to the customer, either through enhanced odds in sports or greater choice of game content and longevity of game play in casino, poker & bingo.

Consolidation – I said it last year and sure enough, even more massive operator mergers happened in 2016. For those trying to cut costs and find economies of scale I’d expect to see more corporate flirting, more ‘will they/ won’t they’ and more panic shopping as the industry tries to buddy up to compete with the big boys. Pinnacle CEO Paris Smith has repeatedly confirmed that despite the inevitable slew of mismatched weddings in the gaming industry Pinnacle will, as ever, continue to remain happily unattached.

Jonathan De La Rosa, CTO, BetVictor 

Big data – 2017 will see egaming companies finally begin to understand the true value of big data. Whilst we have seen some business leaders take the lead in adopting a centralised data strategy, integrating data into the core of the business, we predict that this will be the key technology trend in 2017. All forward-thinking and successful egaming companies will have data at the heart of their business next year.

Cybercrime – Cybercrime will also be a key theme for 2017, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks still exist and remain a major threat to egaming companies. The attacks, however, are now becoming more targeted such as brute force attacks against the digital channels targeting customer accounts.  The egaming community consists of excellent technologists and talented engineers. We, as a highly transactional ecommerce industry, should work together to combat these criminal activities.

Voice recognition – Voice recognition is something that we believe will really add value to the egaming industry. This year we have begun actively creating a framework around Micro Services and API’s to allow us to move quickly into the voice recognition market. 2017 will see voice enabled platforms transform the customer experience and result in a much more actively engaged customer than we currently see.