The week in B2B news (16 November 2018)
A round-up of the latest news from industry suppliers including updates from SportCaller, Microgaming and SBTech
FTP sports game developer SportCaller have signed a partnership deal with William Hill and Racing Post to optimise its flagship Lucky7 game.
Lucky7 is a weekly free-to-enter competition in which players compete for a prize pot of up to £100,000 by selecting the winners of seven televised races every weekend on ITV Racing.
Lucky7 has been customised by SportCaller to drive retention across all platforms, boosting the user experience.
SportCaller MD Cillian Barry said: “Having worked successfully with William Hill on Lucky7 over the past two years, we are now thrilled to expand the partnership with Racing Post, whose brand and audience represents a perfect fit for this game.
Tom Warren, online marketing director at William Hill said: “We’ve already seen that Lucky7 goes straight to the heart of account-acquisition and retention, with its intuitive nature and logical gameplay having a very broad appeal amongst our customers.
Microgaming has partnered with independent table games developer Switch Studios to produce exclusive games for the Isle of Man-based supplier.
Switch studios forms part of Microgaming’s studio strategy, and plans to collaborate closely with operators to craft bespoke games to suit the needs of their player bases.
Roulette is the first of a full suite of exclusive table games developed by Switch Studios to be launched by Microgaming, with Blackjack expected to launch in coming months.
John Coleman, Microgaming CEO, said: “Bringing Switch Studios into the fold ensures we have a dedicated resource for innovating and enhancing our table games offering.
“The team have already demonstrated a facility for producing stylish and sophisticated casino games that are highly original and entertaining, and I am looking forward to developing this side of our range even further in the coming months.”
SBTech will enter the French market in Q1 2019 through a number of partnering operators.
Third quarter numbers released by French regulator ARJEL earlier this month demonstrated a 28% year-on-year increase in egaming turnover to €2.78 billion and a 21% rise in gross gaming revenue (GGR) to €271 million.
SBTech will continue to expand its regulated market footprint with further entry into several regulating and emerging markets including Sweden, South Africa and Pennsylvania in 2019 and beyond.
Richard Carter, CEO, SBTech, said: “Our strategy is to enter every leading regulated market and 2018 has seen our presence grow significantly across key regulated and newly regulated territories.”
SportCaller has also launched a £1m jackpot game with Lottoland to coincide with the new series of ‘I’m a celebrity get me out of here’.
Jungle Jackpot offers players the opportunity to win £1m if they can correctly forecast the final placings of the celebrities in the ITV programme, by predicting the order in which they will leave the jungle.
The main jackpot will see Lottoland partner with some of the UK’s biggest digital properties to promote the game and reach a broad and highly social target audience.
Nigel Birrell, CEO for Lottoland said: “The ability of SportCaller’s games to organically harness player engagement around sports events made them the perfect fit for this partnership.
“We’ve no doubt Jungle Jackpot will provide a real and immediate boost to both our acquisition and the cross-selling of Lottoland’s array of popular products,” Birrel said.