This is one of potentially a series of posts I'll be making for Bitcointalk on the crypto casino industry, how I see things playing out, and where we go from here.
TL;DR - if you want to go up against the king, you should probably be better than them in some way.
Full disclaimer ahead of time: my team and I are in the process of building a crypto casino. Most of us are relatively new entrants to this particular space; our expertise lies in crypto, influencers and sportsbooks which all have aspects of similarity but I fully acknowledge there are some industry specific details that I may be overlooking.
For the past few months, I’ve been keeping a very close eye on crypto casinos. Very rarely will a new platform or feature come out that we didn’t have some idea of ahead of time, and I could probably name every single platform worth knowing and their full feature set with my eyes closed. Through this obsession, it’s become extremely apparent that differentiation is a massive missing piece in the crypto casino puzzle.
To give context as to why this is occurring, this is an industry where taking risks can be difficult. A lot of people will comment on regulation within the space, but there are still frameworks that need to be abided by - these frameworks affect what products you can offer, who you can offer to, and various details around accepting funds. As well as that, a lot of the times you really don’t need to differentiate to produce decent revenue. Gamdom and Duelbits are good examples of this. It’s hard to point to any degree of actual differentiation, yet they’re still making a considerable amount of money (from what we’ve observed).
To some degree, benefit of the doubt can be awarded to a few competitors who are trying various things but retain similarity to Stake. Rollbit seem like they’re trying to pivot more to short-dated, highly leveraged crypto derivatives, and their NFT jackpot and Rollbot schemes are interesting at the very least. BC.Game do a lot, they’re targeting a very specific audience and seem to be doing very well at that.
In saying that, some things cannot be excused. An easy example is Punt.com - I’m not going to rip into them too hard, but calling that anything other than a carbon copy of Stake is insane. Punt has claimed to have guidance from their ‘close friend’ Eddie at Stake, but to some extent I doubt the validity of that. Another example is Slotella; all you need to do is look at their logo.
Stake does a lot of things well, and they’re not the biggest in the market for no reason. Making ‘provably fair’ the standard for house games, the design of their gamecards (props to whoever came up with that Stunna), a simple but thoughtful interface. Stake have built a very good basis for inspiration that I can’t fault people for modelling their own sites off - however if it’s anything but inspiration, there’s really not a tonne of respect you can give.
At the end of the day, real competition is good for the space. Whilst it might be hard to imagine for those of you who have been gambling and posting here since 2016 or earlier, we are still extremely early in terms of the evolution of this industry. Exciting things are happening within tech, crypto and the internet as a whole, and it seems like that hasn't fully converted to gambling just yet - a big reason is due to the lack of actual competition. Competition forces companies to either change or risk being left behind. Those that build, keep up and grow; those that copy slowly die out. We'll soon see which is which.
2023 is the year of S______.com.
They do say that imitation is the best form of flattery, but in reality casinos are a financial business and where there is a lot of money at stake then a working business model will get copied because it will be profitable. Relatively few people have the monetary resources and connections required to launch a casino, it is fraught with all sorts of hidden risks as well - so it's understandable that few new ones last the long term. You need deep pockets to make it through the setup stage and then hope to continuously grow with different forms of advertising. Security is also going to be a huge cost, both maintaining the integrity of your scripts and also keeping attackers at bay who will happily DDOS you all day to seek a ransom.
