Topic: 1 - The copycat epidemic within crypto casinos. - page 11. (Read 3232 times)

Usually the gambling sites offer same nature of games, bets and services and hence we see most of them copy the design and other details from other gambling sites.

If any site especially the new one want to make a name , they should stand out with unique designs and also come up with some new games and ideas. Using the same script and theme won't help them grow fast as people do not trust the sites which resembles with other trusted site.

with PUNT I absolutey agree - I even think they used a very cheap casino software someone sold here a while ago for less then 0.1 btc

I would be absolutely careful advertising and gambling on the website.

I mean, this should always be the goal of any launching gambling sites if they plan to be successful even if they are not trying to go up against the top crypto casinos. introducing something where your gambling site is better attracts gamblers.

I guess he isn't too worried because copying someone doesn't automatically bring success, the casino would still have to prove themselves if they want gamblers coming back to their gambling site.

It's because trying to change up something would probably require a lot of investment and wouldn't even guarantee a return of it in the long run. Businesses are made to create profit after all and the most stable way to do so is to basically copy the general guidelines that earlier businesses with the same model have set. You'd only have to improve the reputation with simple marketing stuff to actually attract customers. A unique identity is really hard to create, especially in casinos where their luck-based games are the main feature, and seeing that most of those types of games are just a reskin of the same old ones, you won't really get anything "new" out of that.

I do love the idea of Rollbit and the NFT feature, but I'd consider it as a marketing feature instead of the core "luck-based" requirement that casinos have. It makes them unique in that their reward system is a lot more intricate with it, but it's only limited to the rewards part.

The thing is... businesses build a brand, for example McDonald's and Wallmart etc... and they even take people to court if they copy their fonts or color in their company name, when they copy it. It is bad for their "Brand" if these copy cat sites misuse their image for their own profits and when they do not give the same level of customer satisfaction as the original company.

When you play at a very popular casino, you get a good experience... because their support is fast or their deposit and withdrawals are fast, but when you get to the copy cat sites... those things might be lacking.... and then you feel cheated. (They look like they are part of a franchise or a group of casinos... so you expect top quality from them)  

Basically most gambling sites are copycats, they almost do the same thing with little or no difference. The difference that I see is just on the interphase and the name or logo design but in content I think there are no much difference. Some try to differentiate themselves by bonus they give to customers when you bet not at registration. Another difference is in the odds to the games but apart from this basic factors, they have the same content and source code. Real competition can only be introduced when developers think differently from each other to introduce something different.

When the innovation is not a differential factor, the revenue has to be earned via advertisement, referral programs, etc. That's why we can see the current situation of aggressive advertising between not just the leading betting companies, but from the newer ones that want to become a benchmark in the industry.

It is much easier to copy the mechanisms, layout, etc... than to create a new one from scratch. This way, all the efforts can be focused on marketing actions that make them reach a growing target audience.

I don't know how did you arrive at the conclusion that there is a lack of competition in the gambling industry, casinos are spending money on ads, and signature campaigns and giving a good percentage to affiliates, they are paying streamers and hiring ambassadors to promote their platform and this is million of dollars spent, I keep saying that the casino industry has stiff competition and there's really a stiff competition going on they never stop giving perks to their VIP or high rollers just to keep them playing int heir casino and shut out other casinos, even if there is the similarity of design and concept the competition is always there.

In 2014 when I started to gamble, I see many sites that in my country that copied one another, It was funny enough to the extent that some sites in the neighboring countries are also copying the gambling site in my country, especially they have almost similar layout for their lite version. They were all copying the first existing gambling site in my country. What I liked about the first gambling site is that in 2016 or so, the first gambling site changed his site layout entirely and still it is one of the best gambling site in my country up till now, but there are other gambling sites that do not copy the site, even the gambling site with the highest customers today in my country did not copy the gambling site, while others that first copied it are also having more customers daily and some are changing the layout of their site already.

The issue starts from the developers that depend to first use an already made source codes, but with time, as the gambling sites are getting stronger, all these will change.

Many of them just recreate what common people use or they see succeed because they want to replicate what success gotten by the one they copied this is the reason why we mostly seen casino offered almost the same games with other. But it will all vary depends on how the casino perform and how they put some efforts on marketing, then putting active guys to solve problem which is main concern by almost all of us since this one could give them one step to success.

Good question and I am gonna give my opinion regarding this. For me as a player, it is both good and bad. It is good because it is easier for me to explore the new site because I'm familiar with the older site and maybe I do not need to ask many thing first if the new site is like 90% or more similar to the older site. It is bad because it will be boring to see some different sites but looks almost the same and it may confuse me in the future. It is possible that I may play in the wrong place because of the similarity. All in all, copying other casino 90-100% is not really good because most people will think that the site is not having much efforts to have their own style.

With gambling platforms beyond certain point it isn't possible to innovate things. Maybe the interface and the colour schemes can be varied. In that way everything is a copycat. With different games, maybe the providers can vary. With sports betting, the odds can have slight variation. These days the success of the gambling sites were much on the trust it have got and the support and interest the service provider takes in solving an acquisition against the platform. So, even the copycat can succeed if it is able to provide the best service than the Originals.

Thank you for your interesting post but I didn't really understand your point. Do you think those copycats are a good thing or a bad one for the players/customers at the end?
If Stake doesn't respect its customers or scams them, it will get a bad reputation and people will fly away to its close competitors. But if it takes care to remain honest, respectful, transparent and professional toward its customers, there is no point for them to leave it for a copycat casino offering the same features and the same games/markets with less bonuses and promotions or smaller odds and RTP, while they have maybe an already high ranked account with interesting bonuses there.  

Regarding Bitmex, Arthur Hayes already admitted he didn't invent the main product of Bitmex, the Inverse futures (aka crypto futures).

https://blog.bitmex.com/all-aboard/

I think I have to agree with Eddie, the biggest compliment is imitation, but they can only imitate the design or part of the concept but what will separate the leaders from a copy is the reputation they've established and the name the gamblers can associate themselves, ok let's say you are playing in Stake.com, and you sign up and play on a casino that copies Stake.com you will still feel that you are on Stake but you will not feel that you are comfortable playing on imitated casino, because you cannot just give trust to a new casino, just like you gave to a casino that you've played for a long time.

Welcome to the forum, it's nice to see a new casino being developed and will use this forum to promote it services for the crypto community. This shows again how popular our forum is for crypto users. You are right that there has been a rise of crypto casinos over the years and the market has become very competitive. There are basically two ways for a new casino to acquire marketshares. The first one is by offering something new that other casinos don't offer, this could be new games, better service or other feature. The second way is by offering better terms than existing casinos. If there are higher bonuses or higher chances of winning for the gamblers than it will attract a lot new customers. In both cases its important to run a marketing campaign to inform potential customers of the advantages of your casino. The forum can play a big role to promote a new website and new gambling games. Good luck with your casino and I hope you will keep us updated on the progress. If you need any help there are a lot of freelance workers offering their services here on the forum, with many already worked in the gambling industry before.

As you already said it yourself in the beginning if you are up against the king you should be better in some way compared to them.To achieve it you need a lot of time and study,you can study each big reputable casino and what they offer and after you have made your conclusion you can come up with your plan.It should be a simple plan that your casino to offer the best to the players,from the user interface to the variety and huge number of games together with the best promotions.In order to do this you need a huge budget since you want to fight against the king and be somewhat better than them.

Moreover, there will always be room for competition in every field/market, of which the gambling casino industry is not left out, because in as much as most new casinos now copy the features and style of old existing casinos, there will always be only one who offers the satisfactory delivery to it's targeted customers/gamblers at every moment. And the users knows that and they are going to stick to such casino. Because one thing that will make a casino stand out in the midst of others is it's ability to update according to the request of it's gamblers, give them what they want, how they want it and when they want it on time. So i am personally not against copycat

In the end, a casino is simply a casino. What makes it stand out is mainly the games it offers and the bonuses provided. But still, they share many of the game providers, rakeback structure, etc.

After all, players want the best bang for their buck, not just winning what they wagered. So saying X is the best, and such is pretty much subjective because they excel in different areas. Casino A could be holding frequent giveaways, casino B could be generous with affiliate commissions, just saying.

Those that want to pioneer in something new need to risk their funds. If all is fine and dandy, good but what happens when the market goes south like now? Many NFTs have lost their ATH value. Rollbit's fortunate they have the financial strength to commit, but for the rest, they might not.

Some do try to reinvent the wheel but without sustainable income, they ultimately collapse. If players are ripping the site from left to right, it's all useless.

I actually asked "Eddie" from Stake.com during his weekly stream about the "friend" that opened a very similar casino to Stake.com and he said "not that I recall" ....but he also said that they are not too worried about sites copying their concept and that it was actually flattering that other people were doing this. (I guess, if you are printing money like them, you would not mind a lot if people copied you)

There are not a lot of big casino software developers out there, so I figure some people just buy a white label casino template from these guys and they just change the color scheme a little to fire up a new casino.  

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.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I don’t know if many of you were trading on BitMEX back in the glory days of 100x leverage, but this is not an uncommon thing to occur in a super fast-moving industry. BitMEX were one of the first to really do crypto derivatives properly, and as a result they very quickly became the king within that space - platforms were popping up left and right trying to do what BitMEX did, some even blatantly stealing entire pages full of MEX’s copy on how the derivatives were structured. Unfortunately for them, BitMEX *invented* these products; any competitor that was a mere copy (Deribit, ByBit, Bitmax) struggled to gain footing on the scale that MEX was. Why would someone leave BitMEX for a shittier alternative?

As you can see today, BitMEX has well and truly fallen off. The issue is that through all of the platforms that popped up, one team launched an exchange that seemed to tick a lot of the boxes that BitMEX couldn’t. FTX. Backed by some of the biggest names in the space, with some of the smartest people working on it, with a product that was made very precisely around the actual behaviours of a trader. At face value though, it seemed like they had a platform that could be slotted in the exact same basket as all the others.

BitMEX retained complacency, FTX continued building to what it is today, the rest is history.

Whilst this might seem to be a totally unrelated story about companies within a different sector, the same principles can be applied to the crypto casino industry. You have one, massive incumbent who innovated a lot of what we see today (Stake); multiple competitors who hold a small but notionally considerable percentage of the market (Duelbits, Gamdom, Roobet, etc); a rapidly evolving space with huge potential upside. The only thing that’s missing is the competitor that will finally give Stake a run for its money.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


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.