Bally’s reveals igaming focus amid sportsbook push

Bally’s CEO Lee Fenton has committed the firm to leaning “very heavily” into US igaming over the remainder of 2022, concentrating on states where igaming legalization is a possibility.

Speaking as part of Bally’s Q2 2022 earnings call, Fenton cited the long-standing need for Bally’s to enhance both its igaming and sports betting product and technology apps, while also expanding into new markets.

Central to this, the Bally’s CEO explained its focus on developing a blueprint for Bally’s business on a state-by-state basis rather than aggressively rolling the product out to every state and potentially compromising on user experience.

“We’re pleased with the new technology that we put together between Gamesys and BetWorks to create our foundational online sports betting (OSB) product, but we need to do more, we need to go further,” Fenton said.

“We’re doing a lot of content integration over the next three months that we’ll see the volume of sports and events increase massively on that product and there is feature development that we still want to do.

“So rather than go and spend marketing dollars on a product that we don’t think will cut through, we’re going to keep those marketing dollars back until we’ve really developed the product.

“In terms of what comes next, we’ll be leaning into igaming.  So anywhere where we think igaming is going to legislate over the next two years or where it already exists,” Fenton added.

Addressing potential targets, Fenton cited existing Bally’s casino assets and regional sports network coverage in Indiana as a potential marker for an expansion should the state legalize, as well as Illinois and Pennsylvania, some of the biggest US states for igaming.

“From our point of view in terms of product development and how that twins to any kind of spend, firstly, I’ve said the product isn’t exactly where we want it to be today,” Fenton explained.

“With our existing igaming product in New Jersey, we’ve got lots of things that we can still migrate over across from the UK, which I think will enhance that product,” he added.

Discussing the Bally Bet sportsbook, Fenton suggested that the Bally’s product development slate was holding up any potential increased marketing push.

“Although our sports product is live in Arizona and New York, we haven’t been spending heavily on marketing or pushing it hard because we still have quite a few content integrations to do.

“We haven’t been pushing that until we’ve got a much richer event line-up inside of that app. That said, in June we did our fifth drop of features onto that app and that’s when it became foundational for us.

“We think we have a number of features which are important but of course, we will continue to develop and drop further features into that app.

Fenton continued: “In terms of a road map for us in terms of where next, we will be adding sports betting to our igaming offering in New Jersey over time.

“We will also add sports into Ontario through our first combined app in the second half of the year, as well as then leaning into Indiana to Pennsylvania to Illinois,” he added.