Gambling consolidation – Will the trend continue?
The past few years have seen a large number of mergers and acquisitions which include some very high profile ones between existing giants in the industry like Eldorado/Caesars, Flutter/Stars, Yahoo/MGM, among many others which are regularly updated here by Gambling Insider. Smaller operators can really only hope to be picked up at a premium, or be left to likely wither on the vine in this new regulatory landscape.
While some consolidation makes sense from both an efficiency and regulatory standpoint, with too much of it users will get an experience that is largely similar between the few main networks. In many cases they’re using some of the very same tech, or slight variations on it. Innovation is becoming stifled and these networks aren’t able to take full advantage of new and emerging tech.
In the case of more monopolistic markets, the evidence is quite clear that it drives users to look for outside options. This was covered by an in-depth article from Gambling Insider with great detail – “Nearly half of Sweden’s gamblers, 42%, were registered with international operators. These companies held no Swedish license or authority to offer a service in the country. What’s worse, where the monopoly is concerned, is 60% of all new accounts registered within the 12 months leading up to 30 June (2019) were with these businesses.”
More recently, the state of New Hampshire is already running into issues with their new monopolized model run by DraftKings. The outages detailed here show a pattern of poor service with the lack of competition. Users in the state are undoubtedly looking to other options.
In trying to appeal to as many as possible and reform gambling into what they feel is most mainstream, traditional networks often find themselves losing sight of what a great number of their users really want. GAMBL is working to leverage the latest tech and their industry experience to better fulfill the needs for all of these disaffected users, and the rest of users as a whole. The network is strongly incentivized to regularly do so, in fact.
