GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 25 - June 2013

Splash Screen last year. At the time – I think it’s fair to say – some executives of Maryland Live! were sensibly too busy opening their casi- no doors and didn’t immediately acknowl- edge the potential of what we launched. They were working toward a June 6th opening of a very substantial casino prop- erty – the fifth largest in the U.S. And it was a brand-new property with no mean- ingful brand equity in the marketplace, in the same way that Foxwoods has or Caesars has. Q: No. The casino is attached to a mall. SMURFIT: Exactly right. So everybody other than GameAccount Network was surprised when what I call a simulated real-money gaming experience took off. Through the Aristocrat partnership, we delivered an Internet gaming experience which was completely connected to and visibly associated with the land-based property and the casino man- agement system inherent within the land-based property. Customers could avoid queues in the property by signing up for the rewards card online. People could look up their rewards points online. A lot of technical functionality was cre- ated between the Internet gaming system and the casino management system in what we call the link, which delivers con- vergence in the way that a lot of casino ex- ecutives have thought about and wanted to do, but they’d never been in the posi- tion of having an Internet gaming system provider as a partner who was willing to go down that path. The reality is patrons of land-based casi- nos in the U.S. or any other country – they are already online. They’re just not online with you. And the same is true of online operators. Your customers are already go- ing into land-based casinos, but they’re not going into land-based casinos with you, because you don’t own a land-based casino. We believe that Internet gaming is a natural, logical extension of any land- based casino operator’s activities. For years, particularly in Europe, there’s been this resistance (from land-based op- erators) – principally fueled by the lack of regulation. A lot of land-based casinos have gone, “Well, it’s not regulated, so we’re not going to get involved.” Hence, the emergence of all these standalone dot- com Internet gaming operators and pro- viders, who have existed in this complete void without really partnering with land- based casinos. 25 The anatomy of a deal