Bucking the trend: 2018 in technology

A year is almost a lifetime in technology, particularly in the online gambling industry which typically makes multiple game and product releases a week. A process that may have been relevant in January could very well have become obsolete by the time Christmas rolls around.

And the beauty of egaming is that while operators and suppliers all maintain very different technology processes, they are all ticking towards the same ultimate goal of operating the speediest and most user-friendly products of all. Sky Betting & Gaming (SBG), for example, shifted this year to using Kotlin as its coding language of choice and Kafka as its product engineering platform.

The rise of cloud-based services have enabled operators (and others) to shift away from their antiquated, legacy tech stacks gathering dust in the back of a Maltese data centre, and onto the much faster and much more efficient cloud. Back in November 2017, SBG director of technology Paul McCormick told EGR Technology the operator had set out a two-year plan to shift SkyBet.com onto its AWS-powered containerisation platform to enable the site to manage much higher volumes of traffic.

SBG now runs its back-end trading engine on Kubernetes as a way to enable the product engineering team to carry out rapid workflows. Previously, they had to separately configure the surrounding datacentre components through various processes. Similarly, bet365 adopted a new programming language in recent months to improve efficiencies across its vast and intricate betting platform.

Head of sports development Alan Reed wrote in a blog post in November: “Go was attractive because many of the challenges we were facing involved highly available, concurrent and performant systems. Once we’d started to play around with it, we found it to be incredibly performant. You don’t have to write as much code to solve a problem.”

In November, Casumo announced it had also been working on updating its proprietary technology. Speaking to EGR, CEO Oscar Simonsson said the continuous updates were geared towards building a more jurisdiction-agnostic stack to speed up performance as regulations quickly evolve and tighten.

“We’ve started to overhaul and rebuild our frontend stack. We are doing this iteratively, by introducing a component architecture, not only to update the product, but also to enable us to develop, ship and iterate faster,” he said.

Global Gaming’s Stefan Olsson highlights the rise to prominence of no-registration and fast withdrawal functions in the last 12 months

Slow movement

On the flipside of the technology coin, the consensus is that 2018 has not been a standout year for innovation and product development. Operators and suppliers have been tied down by ramping up their compliance efforts, preparing for newly-regulated markets like Sweden and states in the US. “This is likely to have stymied incubator and innovation resources,” claims Marc Thomas of Propus Partners.

“2018 was a World Cup year and operators and suppliers concentrated their resources on existing marketing products, as well as ensuring product stability.” Global Gaming’s innovation lab head and former CEO, Stefan Olsson, partly agrees with Thomas but notes the rise to prominence of no-registration and fast withdrawal functions in the last 12 months.

Global Gaming introduced Trustly’s Pay N Play feature in Sweden in 2016 as one of the first operators to allow players to register and withdraw funds by entering their unique Swedish bank identifi cation number. But 2018 was rife with copycats fighting for Swedish and Finnish market share by launching their own Trustly-powered products or, in the case of SBG in the UK and LeoVegas and Mr Green in the Nordics, producing their own fast withdrawal features in house.

“Other operators attempted a much smoother and back-to-basics strategy when it comes to innovation – and they succeeded too,” Stoiximan’s CTO, Aris Dimarakis, notes. “They focused on areas like payments and withdrawals that may not seem that important, but in reality they have an extremely significant impact in a company’s bottom line and user experience overall.”

Taking responsibility

This year notably marked the beginning of a shift in focus for many in product development as operators and suppliers have strived to improve their responsible gambling (RG) efforts. Mr Green led the pack with its AI-powered Green Gaming detection tool that lets players study their own risk behaviours and remedy any problems at an early stage.

Kindred, LeoVegas, Playtech, SBG and bet365 swiftly followed with their own iterations of machine learning-operated RG tech. Propus’ Thomas predicts the industry’s eff orts will continue to be invested into RG technology next year.

He says: “We expect to see significant innovations on responsible gaming as UK and EU operators look to use technology to combat problem behaviour.” Meanwhile, SBTech’s head of innovation, Gregory Karaolis, is of the opinion that this year in technology was partly defined by the industry’s foray into AI. “We have focused on in-house learning algorithms that can act as early warning systems to operators for potential problem gambling behaviours,” he explains.

Next year, Karaolis anticipates that AI will continue to be integrated into operators’ processes, particularly in the way of CRM, sports modelling and trading. Stoiximan’s Dimarakis says the Greek operator, made its first steps into AI in collaborating with the School of Informatics at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.

“More specifically, we developed an advanced ML system that automatically detects account takeovers, as we work actively to ensure that we can always offer our customers the best product and unique betting experiences.”

Elsewhere, the company dipped its toes in the lesser-explored AR and VR pond with its mixed-reality betting and casino app.

No registration and fast withdrawal casinos have characterised the year in egaming technology, but regulations around Europe have restricted operators’ abilities to adopt the functions in certain markets. 2019 is likely to see a bigger rise in these features

Game on

During 2018 it has been difficult to ignore the quick rise of gamified online casinos. Differentiation is key in the over-stuffed realm of egaming and it seems the gambling masses have really taken to social casinos and real-money gambling products that reward players for their loyalty and efforts.

“The biggest winners in adopting gamification tech in 2018 have been the developers and designers who have enough player insight to build a gaming experience to add value,” claims Quickspin CPO Joachim Timmermans. “Casumo and Rizk are now appealing to a far larger player base than ever before thanks to this adoption increasing value and entertainment.”

Timmermans says the sector is barely scratching the surface on gamification, and many operators lack the resources or motivation to drive gamification. “Operators will be forced to rethink their tech strategy if they want to adapt to new markets and a new generation of customers. [And] if suppliers want this to work, they will have to rethink their game development in regard to operators,” he adds.

Global Gaming’s Olsson alludes to a new wave of online casinos in Sweden, where the opening of the market has already attracted vast competition for licences as operators gear up to fight for market share: “Specifically for Sweden, we’ll see more and new innovative ways of creating customer loyalty as opposed to the typical promotions that are heavily overused now.”

In the sports betting arena, bet builders and customer-generated odds products have created the most buzz among players and industry folk alike. “In the medium term, bet builder-style products and requested markets will be rolled out across more sports, given the success operators are seeing with this type of feature in their sportsbook,” Karaolis points out.

Thomas predicts 2019 will be the year of real-time data as operators look across the pond to the US: “We expect to see a huge expansion in the use of algorithm-powered betting, which is likely to expand the range of markets offered on NFL, MLB, basketball and ice hockey, as well as some clever use of visualisations, real-time data and live streaming.” MRG’s CTO, Mattias Wedar, concurs, adding that data will continue to be used to improve and personalise customer experiences.

“[I predict] more focus on real-time support to improve customer experience, further leveraging of data and usage of real-time information and a focus on technologies that enables a smooth cross device user experience.”

There is no certainty as to which technology movements will dominate 2019. Much of the sector’s focus is dependent on consumer trends, and if voice assistants happen to take off and smart home tech and the Internet of Things come to the forefront on the back of the widespread adoption of 5G, then egaming could take a different direction. Only time will tell.

Gamification has been a major theme for 2018 and is anticipated to continue to power the online casino market next year