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Playtech interview
Software innovators have a robust and well-rounded suite of products to cater to land-based casinos and create greater customer retention than ever before…
Think Playtech and you might be forgiven for thinking of online gaming; there’s a lot more to the company than that, though iGaming is certainly a part of their portfolio. What they’re offering land-based casinos is the complete package: online gaming presence, a suite of server-based floor games which can be tailored according to your casino’s needs at different times, and mobile gaming – all of which are integrated, and which can potentially bring you complete customer retention. Imagine a player playing at your online casino, then coming down to the land-based location for the evening; they take the voucher printout from the slot they played last, walk outside, and while they’re waiting for the taxi or train, they can redeem that ticket on their mobile to carry on playing, then get home and log on with the same username and password to keep playing – all under your casino banner. It’s not the future, it’s right now – as Peter Cercone VP Marketing for the Playtech Group (and also Director of Product, Videobet), explains.
Casino International: Videobet and Playtech – what is the relationship between the companies?
Peter Cercone: Videobet has always been a wholly owned subsidiary of Playtech. It [Videobet] was formed about five years ago as an R&D group within Playtech and it was identified even then that the architecture and technology that Playtech had developed over the last ten years in the online space were starting to become relevant in the land-based gaming arena. The company saw the synergies available by making land-based offerings, and so we as a company decided to move into the land-based gaming market. The vehicle for that, the brand, is Videobet, but it’s part of the Playtech group.
CI: A lot of companies in the online sector are talking about synergistic relationships with land-based casinos; the lines between online and land-based gaming have blurred hugely. Where do you fit in to that?
PC: I agree. The market is becoming more and more competitive and it’s not enough to be a successful land-based operator or a successful online operator now, the players exist in both areas, both markets and it’s still all about player acquisition and player retention. So if you have a land-based operation, why would you be happy to lose your hard-acquired players to some other type of line presence? This is one of the main drivers for the ‘coming together’ of online and offline gaming. Playtech as a group has been preparing for a long time both the architecture and the product to allow the operator to have a single solution gaming system, or a one-stop-shop where they can get all of their gaming products from the one company.
The big difference with an offering like this is that it needs to be integrated into a single solution. There’s no point going to a company and saying “Here’s your land-based offering, here’s your online, and here’s your bingo or Poker offering,” then getting the systems to talk to each other. Playtech’s vision of where technology sits is that technology must be an enabler at architecture level to really offer a back end that is seamless for all the products the company offers. For example, the same back end you use for managing poker online is the exact same product you use for managing the bingo product online. And the same back end that a slot operator would also use in a land-based casino. Of course, that doesn’t mean we’re excluding people who don’t have all these market segments available to them – we offer the product at an entry level, if you like, where we can just give them an online presence. The key thing is that as they grow their product portfolio it’s not a matter of getting another system, it’s simply adding another module onto the existing system. Playtech being the size that it is and having ourselves acquired the experience to use the technology and add value to the operator, this is where we’re getting a lot of traction and we’re growing quite well.
From an industry point of view we focus on that single solution – the lines are very blurred and I don’t think there’s any going back now.
CI: Land-based casinos are interesting because they are the driver for so much technology – but even so, they can also be very slow to adopt that technology…
PC: In our view there’s been a lot of talk about server-based gaming, for example. It’s been a catchphrase for a lot of companies for a while but when you actually look at it, they’re building a system with downloads, content on demand, a lot of really very neat and clever features – the problem is in two years time it’s just another legacy system because they can’t extend it to be a real integrated platform so they can offer something simple like lottery tickets or instant scratch product, or poker online, or kiosk services… There’s been a number of companies that have implemented server-based game technology but there’s been very, very few that can put a system that has a wide-ranging platform they can support and basically future-proof it for any product that comes on the market.
CI: But you can do that?
PC: Yes, we can. And we’re starting to see more land-based operators understand that if they don’t move into the online space it’s actually going to become more competitive for them.
CI: What do you do that’s so different to your rivals then? Please explain…
PC: At the actual architecture level, it’s one system; the same code base that’s used for the development of the management system online is the exact same code base we use for the management system that we would install in a land-based casino.
CI: That sounds so simple – so why isn’t everyone doing it?
PC: As a company, Playtech has over 1,000 staff worldwide, of which between 75 and 80 per cent are pure R&D software developers. This ratio is pretty much unheard of in the industry. The only thing we do is develop software; we only operate business to business. We’re also not out there trying to operate web sites ourselves and we’re not in competition with any land-based operator at all. These are some of the big differences – our flexibility and our business model.
CI: It sounds almost too good to be true…
PC: This is what some operators say to us before they see a full demonstration and actually see this working, see how fast we can get content to market, see how quickly we can come up with a design for a completely localised game, because they know their players that well; we can have a game deployed – on terminals, in their operation – in less than 12 weeks. They’re all disbelieving until they actually see the technology.
CI: Do you have a game-neutral terminal of your own?
PC: Interesting phrase! We can put our land-based Videobet software into four different cabinets from four different manufacturers; we don’t deal in hardware.
CI: What jurisdictions are you presently active in?
PC: We’re currently active in operations in the UK, Romania Czech Republic and Italy, and many more to come. We have previously deployed equipment in places like Dominican Republic, Goa, Cambodia… Romania still shows good growth, Italy is very strong and will show growth for the next five years. Then we’ll be looking to focus, make sure we have the right product, and move on from there. We’re certainly not lacking any opportunities, that’s for sure.
We recently achieved GLI11 certification for our product, which is pretty much the gold standard in the industry; it’s a big plus as it’s a recognised certification in terms of security and the robustness of the platform itself.
CI: What are the next steps for Playtech – and Videobet?
PC: It’s very clearly set out in our mission goals. We are committed to being the world leader in the supply of single solution gaming products and platforms. This is how high we set the bar, and this is what everything is working toward. The best at technology level, services level, game content level… we’re always striving for that.
Playtech has made a number of strategic alignments and acquisitions in the last 12 months which has helped us broaden the portfolio and to identify ‘world’s best’ product. Even if we don’t currently have the world-leading product in any class… You can see by the acquisition of Virtue Fusion, arguably the best bingo product available online in the world today – we already had a very competitive bingo product but we could see the synergies we could achieve by working with the team at Virtue Fusion, so we acquired the company. As a company we’re not so much inward looking as we are always evaluating what’s going on in the market.
