Industry predictions: The best (and worst) from 2019
EGR rounds up the most prescient and the most misguided predictions from the industry last year
Predictions are hard; especially when they’re about the future, as the old saying goes. But that hasn’t stopped EGR running its series of industry predictions from insiders over the last few years. This year’s series kicks off next week, but accountability is key and we must check in on last year’s judges and wagons.
First up (and we do really hate to do it) we should give a nod to Alun Bowden. At this time last year, Mr Bowden predicted: “Things will get worse before they get better”.
“Some form of regulatory pushback feels inevitable in 2019, with slots seeming the most likely target….. it would be naive to think there will be no talk of staking limits or other restrictions to the product and its marketing”. Maybe we should start listening to Bowden instead of muting him on Twitter.
EGR should also give props to Simon French from Bixteth Partners, who predicted that the increase in Remote Gaming Duty to 21% would cause a larger-than-expected number of smaller operators to exit the UK market resulting in market share gains for the larger, well capitalised operators. With the Big 7 increasingly becoming the Big 4, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone that didn’t agree French’s prediction had been proven out.
Of course for every shrewd prediction, there’s a misfire and French also predicted that egaming revenue growth in the UK would accelerate as a greater-than-expected proportion of FOBT stakes migrated online. But just last week of course, new figures revealed that UK remoting gambling GGY had fallen for the first time.
Finally, there were plenty of experts predicting that cryptocurrency was about to take over the industry. Matthew Stafford for example, the CEO of BlockChain Innovations Corp, predicted that one big-name operator would launch a blockchain powered product.
“While they may not migrate their entire platform to the blockchain, they are likely to integrate certain blockchain products and tools into their existing technologies,” he wrote.
Unless we missed the launch of Bitcoin365, that one is a miss so far.