Eberhard Dürrschmid, CEO of Golden Whale Productions, gazes into the metaphorical crystal ball to offer their predictions on how the iGaming industry will continue to evolve in 2024 and beyond, and what technologies might shape the future.
Summer marks the start of the iGaming conference season – with events taking place in Malta, New Jersey and Manila just to name a few events on the calendar. But no matter where in the world we’re attending an event, a question that we’ve often found ourselves both asking and answering is ‘where is the industry heading next?’
Over the last few years, the betting and gaming industry has undergone some tremendous changes. From the seismic shift towards the digital space, to the introduction of new regulations, the industry we see before us today is wholly different to what we were working with five years ago.
There have been a few trends that have emerged in the more recent past which we believe will continue to drive further development of the sports betting and casino sectors.
The most influential and permanent, we believe, has been the increasing adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and finally “useful” machine learning (ML) ecosystems.
Great influence of ML & “the long tail” - aka Retention is key!
AI and ML have become huge topics of focus for much of the gaming industry, especially when discussing the urgent demand for by far more powerful player retention mechanisms.
With rising acquisition costs and a landscape of increasingly tighter rules, making the most out of the tools at hand is the deciding factor. We have already seen our solutions driving growth far (100%+) past comparable operations, on the basis of automated, personalised retention systems. Everybody can imagine the impact on the market shares these huge game-changers have in confined, regulated gaming markets!
I do, however, think that the developments we have seen are just the tip of the iceberg. As technology continues to advance, it is likely that we will continue to see AI and ML become much more prevalent in our day-to-day operations. This isn’t to say that technology will replace that ‘human element’; rather the opposite: What we will see is a “New way of working” iterating between human ideation and machine-driven optimisation. The learning curve for organisations will be steep – in a positive way!
A process that may take a human (team) several weeks is a matter of minutes for a machine.
As a result, I believe the most important management decisions in the near future will be where to strengthen human teams and where to hand over responsibilities to data- driven mechanism and how to organise the workflow around these iterative processes – here really is, where the money is!
So ... where is the industry heading? Self-learning tools and a segment for every user!
From what we can see and develop now, I strongly believe the future belongs to self- learning tools that support the production and operation of gaming setups on many high-leverage touchpoints.
The level of automation we have achieved now, makes it possible to already create systems that semi-autonomously look for optimal points of operation while the human teams can focus on the creative process and the development of the product features in a most general sense.
Just think of the complexity we permanently add to our systems – especially when it comes to advanced user-interactions around messaging, (re-)engagement or gamification. Add to that a myriad of possibilities to split up your audience and everybody can see that this machine-made amount of data should best be worked on by machine-driven solutions.
We thereby drive down the player count per segment to ONE and leverage the combination of machine learning and automation to establish a permanent experiment that looks for the best set of variables for this time, product configuration and audience.
Already in the first steps, the results are electrifying, outgrowing standard operations by 100% and more, and have significant potential to reshape the iGaming industry as we know it.
I personally support this idea of machine-human collaboration. A development like that, will most likely have a greater influence than the internet. I personally support this idea of machine-human collaboration. But wherever the industry is heading, we’re excited to see what comes next!
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