Amid big industry changes and an ever-increasing stream of competition, from prediction markets to sweepstakes and social casinos to other entertainment forms, do online gambling companies need to up the ante on gamification?
That was one topic of a panel at the recent Canadian Gaming Summit, where operators and suppliers pondered how best to attract and retain customers in 2025.
“I consistently say that we’re actually not competing with each other anymore,” noted panel moderator Martin Collins of Soft2Bet. “We’re actually competing with TikTok, Netflix, Amazon, all these guys, and we’re competing for screen time because we are entertainment brands.”
Mass appeal, mass effect
“Gamification is one way to touch a new market segment,” added Paris Smith, founder of Life Winning and co-founder of Defy The Odds. “It’s a neat opportunity. A lot of startups create a connection that hasn’t been there before, which creates an interest, and the loyalty to products are going to be stronger. Player experience, the UX experience, there’s still room for improvement. That’s where the real opportunity is.”
Meeting customers where they want to be met, and keeping them engaged in genuinely fresh and interesting ways, is no easy feat. But the panelists agreed that typical engagement strategies from recent years simply may not cut it any longer. Whether you’re an online casino, a sportsbook, a more social gaming-leaning platform, or another kind of gaming operator, providing a consistently entertaining experience is the key to the lock.
“Gamification is typically something that gets very heavily associated with casino,” noted platform provider Gaming Innovation Group’s (GiG) Harrison Barrett. “For us, from a platform perspective, we’re trying to create a more hybrid mindset as to how gamification can lean in both directions.”
FanDuel VP of Marketing Tom Burdakin cited fantasy-first operators PrizePicks and Underdog as two companies that are good examples of how to keep things simple. “They simplify the UX and gamify the experience a little bit, and they’ve been able to capture a little bit of market share that way.”
Burdakin and Tom Metzger, CEO of digital lottery courier Lotto.com, reflected on examples of how their respective companies are looking to up the ante on gamification.
“I wish we had more of a gamified product,” lamented Metzger. He told the room that Lotto.com is launching a suite of free-to-play scratch games aimed at enticing players to come back every day. “You have to actually come back and scratch a piece of it each day in order to have the best chance of winning a prize.”
A tool in the RG toolbox
Meanwhile, Burdakin noted that gamification can be used to great effect on the responsible gambling front, too.
He pointed to FanDuel’s My Spend responsible gambling tool, launched late last year, which allows gamblers on the platform to gain deeper insights into their own betting behavior. The U.S. sports betting market leader said in February that nearly half of its customers used the dashboard during the last NFL season.
Burdakin compared it to the usability of an Apple Watch or a fitness tracker for physical health.
“It creates that visibility for a user to better understand their betting behavior, while kind of making it fun and intuitive,” he suggested. “There are ways you can use gamification and responsible gaming that are really exciting, and there are ways that you can package things up in a more compelling manner.”
Set-and-forget a thing of the past
Certainly, when it comes to what bettors and casino players are looking for, the game has changed somewhat in the last few years.
PointsBet Canada CEO Scott Vanderwel pointed to the prevalence of in-game betting, noting that 75% of all the bets that the operator takes on sports now happen after the game started.
“What that means is that only one in four people are setting and forgetting,” he noted. “The others, while they’re watching the game, that’s a two-screen experience. The same thing could be said on the casino side.”
Particularly given the increased competition from all corners that Collins cited, keeping consumers engaged and on your platform has perhaps never been more important for gambling operators. As industry challenges mount for mobile sportsbooks, who are already starting to feel somewhat the old guard, finding ways to get out in front is vital.
“How and what do you add to your product to compel people to choose to spend time with you?” Vanderwel mused. “It’s a journey we’re still going to be on five years from now. We’re going to find that our product is competing against competitors we never imagined.”
