BETBY identifies new niche on the edge of betting, sports and casino gaming

Sports betting technology company BETBY believes it has found a novel new way to engage the younger digitally-native consumers who will soon become the betting industry’s primary customer-base. The Malta-headquartered company unveiled SlotBets, a new product sitting between sports betting and iGaming, at the SBC Summit in Lisbon this afternoon (1 October). The product has the mechanics of the classic slot game, but is based around and linked to sports. In a press conference at the Feira Internacional de Lisboa, Chris Nikolopoulos, BETBY’s Chief Commercial Officer, gave industry media a breakdown of the firm’s new product. “SlotBets has been developed with speed in mind”, he shared. The game takes fast-paced slot mechanics and applies it to real world sporting events, with reels linked to real-time sports creating 15 second betting rounds, with a return to player ratio of between 93%-94%. The product “sits between a slot, sports betting, and the live sports experience”, he added. “We see our software in BETBY as not just competing with other sportsbooks but with all the other instant products on the market. “We try to make products that are fast, visual, and entertaining, and cater to this specific niche. Trying to create a highly engaging product which can create the appetite for users to combine both the casino UX and UI, together with the sports action side of the event itself. “Sports is the core of our business. We always feel sports itself should drive the result. We didn’t make a traditional slot, we wanted to create something with sports dynamics.” The first iteration of SlotBets is themed around basketball – making today’s announcement rather fitting given that NBA legend Michael Jordan delivered the keynote address of the event, alongside the CEOs of DraftKings and Sportradar, on Tuesday morning. BETBY revealed today that SlotBets will be expanded into other sports. What exactly these sports will be is a guarded secret for now, however, though given the product features 15 second rounds it will have to be fast-paced ones – football, for example. Trials of the new product over the past few months have given BETBY further confidence. Nikolopoulos remarked that “results are very interesting so far, but this is just one game right now basketball. We will release many more sports, we have a lot of prototypes that we will be releasing over the course of the next few months”.