You are moderating a panel on responsible gaming at the CasinoBeats Summit. How important is it that responsible gambling remains a high priority?
As I mentioned before the actual event, responsible gaming is probably the most important piece of our business. We need to look after our customers, if we don’t, nobody else will. If you look at responsible gaming or gambling addiction of you will in the UK market, it’s about .7% of the population. It may not sound like a large number, but that’s about 350,000 people. You switch that to online, that’s about 33,000 people. So, you’ve still got 33,000 people that are recorded as being affected by gambling addiction. So, we really need to look after those people going forward. Like any industry, we want to be a responsible operator in the market place and make sure that we look after our players.
Do you think that operations of UK based companies like Jackpot Joy will be adversely affected by the rise in Remote Gaming Duty here?
Yeah, absolutely, in any particular market, it’s not just the UK market of course. We had a really good panel yesterday. We had people from the UK market, we had people from the Scandinavian markets, from Sweden, Finland, Estonia for example. The issues are exactly the same in all these particular markets and just like any industry, we need to make sure that we look after our industry for its future profitability and growth going forward.
What have you made of the first CasinoBeats Summit?
It’s been great actually, you know if you look around the actual event here today, it’s very, very compact, but that really allows you to mix it up with all the different people in the industry. I came here to try and pick up on a lot of the different buzz words that I just haven’t had the opportunity to actually investigate about when I’ve been in the office and so I can pick and choose all the different events, drop-in, drop-out etc, and then follow-up afterwards, and unlike some of the larger events, you can really do that here. You can actually get to each individual conference session in-between the times. So it’s really, really great for that perspective.
Is there anything in particular you will take away from the conference?
Yeah, I think the combination of people working within block-chain, which is a big buzz-word but it’s applications as well, not only within gaming but also within e-sports, that was very, very interesting, and then also how gamers, i.e. game creation organisations are actually coming into the online gambling space as well. So it’s interesting to see because if you look at game development for example, that really needs to step up a notch now, because the millennials of today, they’re not going to take on the same games that we’ve been delivering for the last 50 years.
