The Fourth National Lottery licence competition continues to develop, as incumbent operator Camelot is challenged by three major European firms.
Contesting the licence competition against Allwyn is the UK-facing brand of SISAL, the SAZKA Group and Northern & Shell.
Discussing the licence competition on the latest episode of The Big Betting Balagan podcast, Lee Richardson observed that Camelot had organised a ‘very efficient’ lottery over the past 10 years, raising an average of £20 billion for lottery duties and £40 billion for good causes.
Richardson remarked: “Most bidders perceive how very difficult it is to unseat this particular operator, and you have to say that – depending on which angle of games you look at – in some places Caemlot have made it a very efficient lottery.
“It’s the fifth largest and returns 96% of every pound it takes back to the players, back to good causes or back to the government in lottery duties.”
He added: “It (Camelot’s National lottery) is very efficient and it does produce a lot for all of those other parties – money back to players and government.”
Richardson did observe however, that spending per head on the UK National Lottery is in the around ‘the top 50 in the world’, but is much smaller than that of other countries.
This can be attributed, he argued, to the fact that ‘there are so many other options that you can bet on in the UK’, whilst in other countries the lottery ‘is the only game in town’.
Although providing some insights on the National Lottery licence contest, the main focus of the most recent episode was an interview with James McLoughlin, Marketing Director of Boom-In Entertainment.
Boom-In Entertainment is a developer and operator of free games, real-money casino and sports betting offerings, supplying its products to a number of prominent US-facing betting and gaming companies including Rush Street Interactive, Penn National and Golden Nugget.
Offering his opinion on the future of free games, he said: “Our NBC Predictive Product was a pioneer in the space, and we’ve seen quite a bunch of different companies to work with to create, and these are bespoke high-end premium solutions, so we’re at the top of the market in terms of the quality of the game and how intuitive it is.
“You see a lot of competitors in the space, in the B2B side, who make these products that can easily be replicated, that are simpler, and I think you’ll see a lot more of those in terms of the focus being on acquisition, so trying to create databases and engage audiences digitally. There’s so many legacy companies that have big audiences that they want opportunities to engage with.”
