The final day of the World Gaming Executive Summit at the W Hotel in Barcelona got off to a slightly muted start with the hotel’s Great Room only half full to hear a discussion on innovation.
Perhaps it was a consequence of yesterday’s appearance on the hotel terrace of boy band One Direction or, more likely, due to last night’s World Cup party which may have left many a Dutch delegate in their hotel rooms nursing heavy hearts and sore heads.
Like the Netherlands’ World Cup dream, One Direction (and the hordes of screaming girls that seem to follow them everywhere) appear to have moved on.
Charged with following that was a morning session chaired by Playtech advisor Roger Withers and featuring a discussion between Atul Bali of Real Networks and Friedrich Stickler, president of the European Lottery Association.
Bali rued the at-times restrictive nature of regulation: “Are we creating regulatory barriers to small companies entering the industry?
“When we look back, where has innovation really come from? It has come from small companies,” he said.
“So how do we get these innovators into the market? That’s a problem with the structure of regulation.”
With specific reference to the US, Stickler agreed that limited regulation, or a lack of regulation altogether, was holding the industry back and therefore the innovators: “In the country of Google and Apple, how are we still discussing whether online gaming should be allowed? It’s crazy.”
Stickler also took aim at the US casino sector: “In my view the traditional gaming sector will run into big problems because it has not engaged its future customers.” His comments echoed those of Bill Pascrell, who yesterday cited the land-based casino industry’s poor marketing as a decisive factor in the slow start to the new New Jersey i-gaming market.
After all the optimism about the US and global markets at the summit in the last few days, it came as something of a surprise that a panel on innovation should be the source of some sobriety and a cautionary footnote.
