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Double vision
London’s new Hippodrome Casino is developing online and land-based strategies hand-in-hand, writes Barnaby Page. Plus:
Gambling.com gets bought, and Caesars gets social
N
ot every operator has the luxury of launching new online and land- based casinos at the same time; more often, it’s a case of trying to recreate a long-established land-
based experience on the Internet. But management of the Hippodrome in London’s Leicester Square, due to open later this year, did have that opportunity. They debuted Hippodrome Casino Online in May, promising that once the bricks-and-mortar venue is open there will be plenty of integration between the two – for example, with the finals of online tournaments involving live events at the casino, as well as a service permitting online gamers to collect their winnings there in real money. “We offer a real difference as we are truly an online casino with, in the near future, a magnificent London club to serve as a magnificent location for the finals of some high-prize online tournaments,” said George Constantinou, Head of Online Gaming. Hippodrome Casino Online offers Poker
tournaments and cash games as well as casino favourites including Blackjack, Roulette and slots, running on a platform from Sweden’s Boss Media. In London, meanwhile, the four-storey venue “will challenge the long-held conceptions of casinos in the UK”, said entrepreneur Simon Thomas, who is backing it. “In fact we’re determined to not only challenge them, but redefine the way in which London, and its visitors, celebrate an evening out.”
Sold.com
We have questioned before in this column whether generic domain names really deserve the value often attributed to them, and pointed out that many of the great success stories of the Web use names that you won’t find in the
dictionary: think Google, Facebook, Wikipedia. That hasn’t, however, deterred Kax Media
from paying $2.5m for
Gambling.com, which it plans to turn into a portal site first for the UK and eventually for all regulated English- speaking markets, growing it “through improvements in conversion rates and more targeted traffic acquisition” – in other words, investing in marketing. (But would the $2.5m have been better spent on marketing a cheaper domain name, given that
Gambling.com hardly dominates the market?)
The free game is monetised by allowing players to spend real cash on virtual money
“
Gambling.com ticked all the right boxes and
provided an immense amount of intrinsic value,” said Kax CEO Charles H. Gillespie. “It was an easy decision given the price. Kax has a conversion-tracking software platform that was purpose-built to run this exact kind of site, allowing for an easy transition to our current business and technology platform. We felt that Kax was the perfect organisation to maximise the value of
Gambling.com.” Five-year-old Kax already operates the
CasinoSource portal, offering Poker, Bingo and casino games to British and Irish players, and plans to extend it across Europe.
Slot lessons
Delivering gaming online doesn’t mean you can ignore the lessons learned from land-based operations, according to UK developer Betlow. It has just signed an agreement with the
Australian slots developer Lightning Box Games that will see Betlow create virtual versions of Lightning Box’s titles for European e-gaming operators.
“Online operators have been looking more and more at land-based slot games in an effort to improve the quality and diversity of the games they offer their players,” says Betlow. Games covered by the deal include Three
Pandas, and Super Happy Fortune Cat. “The popularity of the land-based versions of
these titles coupled with a real appetite among the online community for fresh, innovative slot games will help make this new relationship a great success,” said Betlow Managing Director Justin Chamberlain. “In our opinion Lightning Box are second to none in terms of their creative and mathematical capability – their excellent relationships with the world’s largest slots providers backs that opinion up.” And Peter Causley, Managing Director of Lightning Box Games, described Betlow as “a good fit to take advantage of all the new and swiftly developing trends from the land-based market and repackaging them for online play”.
Buying into social Caesars Entertainment, the former Harrah’s,
is putting its money where the buzz is: social gaming, through an investment of around $85m for a majority stake in Israeli developer Playtika. Playtika develops so-called “casual games” which players can dip in and out of on platforms such as Facebook. They include Slotomania, a slot simulation, which is free to play yet monetised by allowing players at advanced stages to spend real money on virtual game money. Now Playtika will develop social applications
for Caesars. JUNE 2011 61
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