Data, Tech Stacks and Gamification – The Technology of iGaming

Posted by Harry Kane on Friday, January 7, 2022

The global iGaming market is now worth in excess of $58.2 billion, while it’s expected to grow at a CAGR of 12% over the course of then next eight years.

This means that it will achieve a cumulative market value of $145.6 billion by the year 2030, with this largely driven by growth in burgeoning and high potential markets such as North American and Africa.

Key to this growth (both from the perspective of operators and the market as a whole) will be innovation, which continues to play a central role in everything from the delivery of verticals to the creation of a safe and well-regulated marketplace. We’ll explore the importance of innovation more below, while considering the relationship between technology and global iGaming.

How Technology Can Help to Increase an Operator’s Competitiveness

There are two significant challenges facing operators in the digital age; namely the competitiveness of the iGaming market in developed nations such as the UK and and the need to comply with an increasingly stringent regulatory climate.

Technology is key in overcoming both of these challenges, primarily in the form of big data. After all, while online casinos and sportsbooks have the basic capacity to react to events and player behaviour in real-time, they may struggle to pull the necessary data quickly and in a way that can inform future actions and policy decisions.

For example, as an operator, you may obtain various datasets following a single spin during a slot game, including a player’s stake amount and willingness to activate every single payline. This information exists and is pertinent to an individual customer’s activity, but capturing and leveraging it effectively is either incredibly difficult or simply impossible to do.

Secondly, diverse and sophisticated tech stacks are also pivotal when looking to establish a functional, competitive and compliant online casino or remote sportsbook. Make no mistake; online entities of this type are built on underlying technology stacks, from their core business models to the fundamental way in which they deliver services and verticals.

However, the issue here is that some of the technology stacks that underpin online casinos and sportsbooks were initially constructed years ago, and the failure to regularly update, upgrade and augment these entities can lead to ‘tech debt’ and cause businesses to fail over time.

This is particularly true in a competitive marketplace such as iGaming, so the cultivation of a relevant and contemporary tech stack is becoming increasingly seminal with every passing month and year.

One of the biggest consequences of this can be observed in the extended development and integration timeframes, which in turn means that it may take months to launch new games or verticals and bring these successfully to market. In the meantime, other brands may beat you to the punch, claiming a more dominant market share and potentially eating into your own customer base in the process.

These hurdles create two clear focal points for online gambling businesses, as they look to leverage big data and its real-time analytical capabilities and consistently upgrade their existing tech stacks over time. Both goals require companies to move forward strategically and make informed decisions about the tech stacks and models, while recruitment may also be a role in ensuring that a betting brand can remain relevant in an increasingly digital age.

The Role of Gamification

Of course, the utilisation of live data and development of existing tech stacks are familiar concepts for online betting brands, while companies will already have existing technology that can help them to compete in the iGaming marketplace.

However, the notion of gamification as a key online casino tech tool is a little newer and more fanciful, albeit it may also prove increasingly crucial to long-term buy-ins from customers and the cultivation of loyalty as the market becomes more and more competitive.

If we use the earlier example of a single slot spin, for example, gamification could be leveraged to elevate this experience onto an entirely new level and create additional narratives around the game. This would also represent a natural progression in an age of complex themed slots, while it would increase each customer’s emotional connection to a particular title and establish all-important ‘dwell time’ for players.

The latter may also create additional opportunities for in-game purchases and income streams, especially if players and an online casino brand appear to be working in tandem towards jackpot win as part of a much more immersive and collaborative experience.

Of course, gamification works better with some casino verticals than others, but there’s no doubt that its hold huge potential in slot gaming and could revolutionise this particular experience in the marketplace.

What About Live Streamer and Community Betting Online?

On a final note, we’ve also seen the emergence of live streaming and community betting platforms, with inplayLIVE arguably leaving this market at present. This platform combines both live streaming technology with an immersive online community, which allows for collaborative online sports betting and lets individuals benefit from detailed and expert analysis.

Similar to the concept of social financial trading, this allows novice and inexperienced sports bettors to learn from others and transform losing track records into winning models, while even creating a provision for such punters to become experts and sports value analysts within the community over time.

There’s undoubtedly the potential for sportsbooks (particularly those that offer live streaming as a future) to build this type of community and platform from its own existing tech stacks, turning a disparate audience into an engaged and collaborative community that can grow and potentially place a much higher number of bets overall.

What’s more; this could also be applied to casino verticals such as slots and table games, particularly live blackjack, roulette and poker tournaments where community players can compete against one another in real-time.

This could represent an exciting and evolutionary future for iGaming brands, but it should be remembered that the foundations for such innovation have already been laid and prepared.