What Next? Navigating iGaming after the gold rush.

In 1850, the California gold rush was at its' peak. Every second panner came home rich, and the people selling the pans were making more money than they knew what to do with.

By the end of the 1850s, the situation was very different. The idea that going to California and buying a pan was basically a license to print money had spread everywhere. Everyone was doing it. And that was the beginning of the end.

That is more or less where the iGaming industry is today.

Fortunately, the resource we're working with is not as finite.

But saturation is still slowly choking the market.

Think about it - in the last year alone, around 150 new game studios were founded. Turnkeys pump out identical looking operators weekly. Even media houses and conferences are becoming saturated, with new events and podcasts coming out faster than you can count them.

Studios still think a clever theme change or mechanics that are original in a way most players won’t get differentiates them. Aggregators think their original games differentiate them. Lord alone knows what goes through an operator’s mind when they launch a brand that looks like a hundred others.

Spoiler alert: they don’t. Not really.

And for far too many people, the answer has been a race to the bottom. Operators offer higher CPA and bigger welcome bonuses. Providers and aggregators slash their rates and offer bigger discounts. And that's the funny thing about a race to the bottom: no one wins.

Really, we cannot be surprised that all these layoffs are happening; we're getting into the Biblical lean years. The market isn't shrinking. But the amount of people vying for a piece of the pie is outgrowing it.

On a panel at Next in Valletta, I said I expected providers to become the new payment solutions, where a hundred barely distinct ones are vying for the attention of the same few operators. I gave it a couple years. I vastly undershot.

The future, I think, is going to be defined by relationships more so than ever before. We're already seeing it happen; AM/BDM positions where a good relationship with Stake is a requirement. Your product may be cool, but unless it's REALLY cool in a truly unique way that captures the attention of the end user, your clever math and interesting mechanic doesn't get you as far as they would have 5 odd years ago. And increasingly, pitches are becoming less and less about what’s in the deck, and more and more about who the deck is coming from.

It’s also going to be about what some of us currently consider unconventional partnerships. People turning paid intro channels into a full-time job. Providers and affiliates working directly hand in hand to guide traffic to a particular section of an operator’s casino page. Creator and influencer driven B2B. These things are already happening, but they’ll dial up massively going forward.

If you’re a commercial leader or a founder, or if you want to be one of these things in the future, this is your sign to start building a real and solid network. 15,000 followers on LinkedIn helps, but it’s not the endgame if you don’t know how to leverage it. What you have to do is get good at being invited into rooms most people are not.

This is not a doomsday prediction post. Our industry is not going anywhere. But as it adapts to what has been an explosion of saturation, we’re either going to adapt with it, or get left behind.