GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 44 - July 2019

one big market into a multitude of smaller jurisdictions. All the same, the panelists were determined that some order should be imposed on the chaos. Panelist Alex Igelman, founder and managing director of Esports Capital Corp, predicted that, if a regulatory structure for peer- to-peer esports wagering was established, innovative companies would design new games to fit that structure. I’M AFRAID OF AMERICANS As the U.S. market opens up and develops its own ways of doing business, international gaming companies that want to move into the new space will be forced to adapt, not only to whatever regulatory structures are put in place, but also to cultural and political differences. (One debate at the conference was titled simply “Motion: European suppliers aren’t American enough.”) In the debate “Motion: the evolution of the U.S. affiliate market will follow the European model,” Nick Wilby, head of U.S. and global media at Oddschecker — a U.K. sports affiliate owned by Catena Media, which has been operating in the U.S. for about three months — said that he had been surprised by how educated and competitive the U.S. market already was, but that Oddschecker would nevertheless need to undergo a process of “Americanization” to succeed in the U.S. long-term. Another feature of the North American gaming scene is the presence of tribal gaming. Canada has had both tribal gaming and iGaming for years, but in the U.S., iGaming and sports betting are both new factors in the relationship between com- mercial and Indian gaming. Companies that wish to operate Affiliation, of course, is not the only area of the gaming industry concerned with professionalization. I attended a session of the Casino Esports Conference on “Legal Regulation of Esports and Sports Betting,” where panelists discussed the challenges of bringing the scandal-plagued, largely unregulated $70 billion esports betting industry into some semblance of respectability. A major obstacle here is the video game publishers, who have a vested financial interest in selling hundreds of dollars in loot boxes to minors (including one of the panelists’ sons) and are unlikely to self-regulate. Another hurdle is the invisibility of the illegal market to regula- tors, who may not even have any way of knowing that they should have been looking at, say, how much money the now-defunct CS:GO Lounge skin betting market was bringing in from the U.S. (answer: $7 billion). And if esports is a sport, as some say, then it’s subject to the Wire Act, which would split what’s currently As the U.S. market opens up and develops its own ways of doing business, international gaming companies that want to move into the new space will be forced to adapt , not only to whatever regulatory structures are put in place, but also to cultural and political differences . 35 G P W A t i m e s . o r g