Portugal primed for Google Play Store green light
Iberian nation selected as the “headline” territory for tech giant’s phase two rollout of real-money gaming apps
Portugal is set to become the next major market to gain access to Google Play Store real-money gaming (RMG) apps, EGR can reveal.
Speaking to EGR, Google industry head for financial trading and igaming Chris Harrison revealed the Iberian nation will be the “headline” territory in the tech giant’s next Play Store repeal.
He said: “We’re aware that the likes of Portugal was not covered as part of that launch. We would expect to go live with a phase two at some point this year. It’s very much a global approach for us and Portugal is perhaps the headline one.”
Google completed phase one of its repeals in March 2021, which saw 15 additional countries added to the initially opened markets of the UK, France and Ireland.
The March repeal saw countries including the US, Spain and Sweden gain access to Play Store official RMG apps, with Google now firmly focused on phase two.
Harrison also revealed the Alphabet-owned firm would be taking a global approach in phase two.
He continued: “As far as sub-Saharan Africa, there’s a bunch of countries regulating there. It’s just where we feel comfortable with the degree of regulation and feel comfortable that we can go live with the Play Store in those territories. We’ll also look at parts of Latin America and parts of Europe.”
Asked as to why the time period between the first set of repeals and the March 2021 repeals was longer than expected, Harrison said it was a case of wanting everything to be perfect before diving in at the deep end.
He said: “From a back-end point of view, we don’t necessarily want to put human reviewers against all of our policy changes so we’ve gone back and forth multiple times and built a fresh bunch of new processes and practices in the background in order for us to set ourselves up. There’s been a bunch of things we’ve needed to get right.
“The US regulating gave us a bit of a jolt and that certainly helped but we essentially wanted to build a sustainable platform with the right back-end that wasn’t cobbled together and therefore would break, as we had that a little bit with the UK, Ireland and France,” he concluded.