Learning from complaints
The latest figures on e-gamers’ grievances suggest that the online experience is improving, but some problems still need fixing, reports Barnaby Page. Plus: a big new name in Internet slots
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Nearly half of complaints were settled in the player’s favour
n even the best-run and most carefully designed online casino, things can go wrong and players can complain when they don’t get what they expect. Who’s to blame? The answer, according to the British gamer-protection body eCogra, is
that responsibility for foul-ups is split almost equally between consumers and casino operators. During the first half of 2010, eCogra’s Fair Gaming
Advocate Tex Rees resolved 287 player complaints concerning Internet gambling sites it had accredited. (About a further hundred couldn’t be acted on, either because of “insufficient detail, irrelevance, abuse or anonymous origin”, or because they related to sites not certified with the nonprofit’s Safe and Fair Seal – the organisation has no statutory right to police online gaming, and does so only with the consent of participating casinos.) Of those 287, nearly half – 47 per cent – were
settled in favour of the player, and the remainder in favour of the casino. Yet although more casinos bear the eCogra seal this
year than in 2009, the number of complaints actually dropped – to 11 a week, one fewer than last year. “We can attribute a portion of this drop in disputes to the fact that we have now been working with many of the Seal operations for several years and as a consequence a number of policies and procedures have been developed that translate to less cause for disputes. Our operators are also better equipped and motivated to deal with disputes at the operator level,” said Rees. However, the main causes of complaints – cashing in
(43 per cent), issues with bonuses (21 per cent), and problems with locked accounts (21 per cent) – were broadly the same as last year, suggesting that these remain important areas for online operators to address.
Lot$.com
Online slots have, up to now, been scattered across a plethora of casino Websites, some bearing the brands of bricks-and-mortar parents while others exist on the Internet only. There has been no clear
28 NOVEMBER 2010
market leader. But that could change with the arrival of
Slots.com, following the sale of the domain name to Bodog, a venture-capital firm based in Antigua and specialising in leisure industries. The company says that
Slots.com will provide “a full
suite of gambling products”, but as important as its gaming offer will be its Web address. Owning the generic domain name that describes a whole sector is widely held to be a priceless advantage, conferring easy memorability, the instant appearance of authority, and a strong likelihood of appearing at the top of Internet searches. There are more than 6m Google searches for the term “slots” each month, according to Bodog. It is recruiting a hundred staff for business
operations, headquartered in London, and technology teams both there and in Barcelona. The gaming service itself will be licensed in Antigua. “There is no strong brand in the slots area like
there is in, say, Poker – yet any casino off- or online will happily admit that slots are not only physically the biggest part of the casino but, more crucially, in profitability terms slots are equally dominant,” said Lee Richardson,
Slots.com’s Managing Director. “The domain gives us a fantastic edge [with search
engines], and when coupled with the brand experience and marketing clout we will add, this venture becomes a very powerful proposition,” said Richardson, a former Managing Director of Tote Direct, non-retail Chief Operating Officer of Coral Eurobet and Chief Executive of Ireland’s Boylesports. Although claimed by
Slots.com’s new owners to be
the largest amount spent in 2010 on a domain name, the price tag of around £4m – approximately $6.4m – is dwarfed by the $35m that online-marketing firm QuinStreet committed earlier this year to pay for
Insurance.com and also by the $13m that recently secured
Sex.com, long considered among the most valuable of all domain names.
Casino.com sold in 2003 for $5.5m, almost exactly the same price fetched by
Slots.com – in today’s dollars.
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