IGT Kills Its European-Facing Web Poker BusinessCompany Still Focused On Nevada Plans As Gateway To U.S. Market |
|
Nevada-based International Game Technology, perhaps known best by its dominance in the slot machine market in the Silver State, is saying goodbye to its real-money online poker operations in Europe, Bloomberg News reported Tuesday.
The news comes about a week after the company announced that it will shutdown the Entraction Poker Network, which it bought for about $115 million last year.
IGT essentially said that Europe is a regulatory mess when it comes to online poker, and it’s not worth pursuing at the present time. According to a recent study by PricewaterhouseCoopers, Europe is full of “national online gaming monopolies,” but progress should come “toward countries working together on licensing and pooling liquidity across borders, especially for poker.”
The plug had previously been pulled on the company’s online poker business in other countries around the world that are considered legal “grey areas.”
While poker is now a forsaken endeavor for the company in foreign markets, online poker in the U.S. is still on its radar, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. IGT has already obtained a license to act as a business-to-business provider of web poker technology. It will partner with Nevada brick-and-mortar casinos, further deepening its established relationships.
Despite Nevada’s 2.7 million residents and millions of visitors per year being wide open for the taking and IGT positioned to be a major player, the company, like everyone else, including state officials, is holding out hope for a federal bill to pass and legalize Internet poker nationwide.
Efforts have been rejuvenated on Capitol Hill, but one casino insider told Card Player that a proposal has virtually no chance of passing anytime soon. At a gaming conference earlier this year, some in the industry expressed concern that legalization by Congress will never come to fruition. Thus, a state-by-state patchwork would be the only way.
IGT CEO Patti Hart expressed skepticism of the model to Bloomberg News: “[Business] is much more challenged when it’s a single state,” she said. Hart was also quoted as saying that Europe has moved from “dot-com to dot-country.”
But that’s the route casino chains and their technology partners will have to travel in order to begin operating real-money poker, and eventually other games, in the U.S. So far, only Nevada and Delaware have legalized the activity. Some legislators in a handful of other states are trying to, most notably California with its massive population of 37.7 million, but it’s unclear how long, if ever, it could take for compromises to be hashed out.
According to Reuters, IGT’s North American business accounted for 76 percent of its revenue during fiscal year 2011. IGT is just one of four companies in Nevada to be involved with the mobile betting business, which has been ongoing for awhile now, according to information from the Nevada Gaming Control Board.
The company’s business in other areas is expanding. It recently inked deals with land-based casinos to leverage its $500 million purchase of a popular Facebook-based casino, DoubleDown Interactive. While IGT is still immensely profitable and more than OK despite the European poker shutdown, the U.S. remains a corporate battleground for web poker.
But, the company has stuck with some optimistic rhetoric. On its website, it says that Nevada web poker is “on the horizon.” The company is expected to have $2.1 billion in revenue this year and grow in 2013, according to data from Bloomberg.
Follow Brian Pempus on Twitter — @brianpempus
Copyright © 2001-2024
CardPlayer.com. All rights reserved.
