Lottery is entering an year of revolution, writes Angelo Dalli, CEO of Bit8, which he hopes to usher in with his bold new “millionaire maker” product: Lotto Hero.
Last month’s ICE Totally Gaming was a milestone for Bit8. After months of development and iteration, our innovative new lottery product, Lotto Hero, broke cover for the first time.
Since pulling back the curtain we have been inundated with enquires from operators keen to learn more about the product and what it can offer them and their players as we enter what we have dubbed the ‘Year of the Lottery’.
Over the course of the next 12 months, lottery will become a major vertical in iGaming markets all over the world as operators morph into truly multi-vertical businesses.
Lottery offers huge untapped potential, from fostering loyalty to crossselling players via engaging new consumers and boosting revenue streams. But previous lottery products have been a little tired and dusty, and players still view it as very much an offline experience.
In particular, lottery isn’t really engaging Millennials and is missing out on interaction with a new generation of players used to spin and win betting and gaming. Sportsbook and casino operators have no incentive to plug their customers into a lottery product and cross-sell opportunities are not being utilised. Lotto Hero has been designed to change all that, and bring the vertical into the modern era.
It does this by giving players the chance to win a guaranteed E1m million an hour, every hour, 24 hours a day. It has taken design cues from fastpaced slots and casino games, which use bright and bold colours to draw in players. It is fresh, intuitive, and very engaging as well as being fully optimised for mobile and tablet devices.
Lotto Hero is a completely new iGaming concept, and provides operators with portfolio differentiation in what is a fiercely competitive market. It is risk free, as Bit8 cover any payouts, and we are able to arrange all the necessary licensing requirements for our partners. We are also offering an attractive commission structure, which means the return to operators is much higher than with casino games like slots.
We genuinely believe lottery will become a significant online gaming vertical in its own right this year, particularly if the product can engage Millennials and familiarise the next generation of online gamblers with operator’s brands and products. In this regard, lottery acts as a gateway to the casino, sports, poker, bingo and live dealer games most of them now include in their content portfolios.
Mobile will of course be key to engaging this demographic, and also to bring lottery into the modern era. Younger players are far more comfortable purchasing lottery tickets and playing games via their smartphones and tablets than entering a retail outlet, but at the moment they don’t have access to a lottery product that has been designed with mobile in mind from the outset, and this is where Lotto Hero will fill the gap.
