Land-based casinos are dealing with a challenge that casino affiliates are all too familiar with, converting players.
Only in this case, the casinos are struggling with the challenge of converting e-sports players into traditional gamblers; the kind who sit at the tables and lose big bucks over extended periods. It’s a massive challenge that could mean life or death for the casino business as a whole.
Part of the challenge casinos are facing when it comes to converting e-sports players is that the e-sports business is so young, most operators simply don’t have much of a handle on what works and what doesn’t. This subject was addressed recently by Kevin Ortzman, Atlantic City regional president for Caesars Entertainment in an interview with Gambling911.com who said:
Everybody’s still trying to figure out — how do you make this appealing for the consumer and make sense for the business? How do we all profit from this?
Ortzman ran into this challenge firsthand when Caesars hosted an e-sports tournament with over 900 players but was disappointed to find that players weren’t streaming from the video dome to the casino floor:
We certainly experienced a spike in our hospitality offerings — the hotel, food and beverage side of things. We didn’t see as much on the gambling side, which we weren’t terribly surprised by.
Overall, land-based casinos are hoping that investing in e-sports players now, while they’re young, will pay off when those same players grow up and have more discretionary income they can spend on gambling.
It’s a pretty big assumption, but it’s one that the traditional casinos are wagering quite a bit on.