live casino online: the evolution continues
From ‘nice-to-have’ to ‘must-have’ to today’s core revenue stream for top-tier operators, live TV studio-based casino games have come a long way in just a few years – and there are further exciting times ahead for operators with a clear online strategy
How times change. Just a few years ago many people were rather sceptical about the potential of live dealer gaming over the internet to engage players and grab substantial market share.
Indeed, some early live casino solutions emanating from the Far East were poorly executed. Quality and the overall player experience were a long way short of European standards – and certainly far below the standard of any online offering a land-based casino would wish to offer its players.
Fast-forward to 2011 and live casino is one of the fastest growing online gaming sectors. What’s more, gaming markets worldwide are reinventing themselves and re-regulating to take account of live gaming’s massive impact.
One company at the very forefront of this phenomenal rise of live casino is Evolution Gaming. Formed in 2006, Evolution had a clear vision of how live dealer gaming – executed to the very highest standards and harnessing the full potential of faster broadband connections and increasingly powerful multimedia PCs – would revolutionise the gaming world.
Real vision According to Evolution CEO Jens von Bahr, “Our vision was very single-minded: live dealer gaming online had to replicate the thrill of actually being in a real casino – that meant
we aRe now at a staGe wheRe opeRatoRs see
live casino as a coRe Revenue stReam and an
oBvious Route to GRowth.
image quality, ease and speed of betting, familiarity and quality of the environment, intangibles such as ambience, and, very importantly, live interaction with the dealer and other players. The whole customer experience had to be right. At Evolution we are perfectionists – anything less wasn’t acceptable to us, and we didn’t believe it would be acceptable to our licensees or to their players.”
“We invested heavily in infrastructure and our TV production studios in Riga and we incorporated the highest production values within a regulated environment.” continues von Bahr.
“We quickly attracted interest from the big
names. That allowed us to continue to invest in a quality product that the world’s leading gaming operators are proud to present under their own brands.”
Bringing us right up to date, Evolution’s Live Casino is now chosen by more top tier operators in Europe than any other offering, a fact that is testament to the company’s vision and pioneering development of video- streamed, TV quality live dealer gaming.
a coRe Revenue stReam Most of the big-name gaming operators, and a considerable number of local and niche operators, too, now see live casino not as a ‘nice-to-have’ but as an absolute ‘must-have’.
“We are now at the stage where operators see live casino as a core revenue stream and an obvious route to growth,” explains von Bahr.
He continues: “Many operators now look to our Live Casino to add more revenue growth than other gaming activities in their businesses. They are factoring in these high growth projections because they’ve seen exactly what our world-class live casino solutions can contribute to the bottom line.”
Lingering operator fears about cannibalisation of existing revenues have proven to be unfounded. In fact, the reverse is true, both for pure online operators and for land-based
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