In the modern online casino market, there are plenty of different legal gambling sites that players can select from. However, when switching from one platform to another, users will see many of the same game titles appear, because individual casinos don’t develop, build and maintain their game portfolios from scratch; instead, they lean on specialised game developers to provide that service for them.
These days, online operators don’t need to develop every aspect of their business themselves. Many legal casinos now prefer ready-made solutions from iGaming software providers such as Skill On Net. Using this provider’s services, Skill On Net casinos can rely on its pre-built platforms, secure payment gateways and user-friendly interfaces.
As for the online casino games themselves, they usually come from a range of developers. If you browse legal gambling sites, you’ll often spot titles from companies like Microgaming, NetEnt, and Play’n GO. So why don’t casinos make all their games in-house?
Cost Effectiveness
While it’s an online casino that ultimately showcases the expertise of iGaming software developers, without those developers, casinos would only be able to offer a very limited online gaming experience due to cost.
Casinos wouldn’t be prepared to absorb the enormous cost and risk of developing games, which is a long and complicated process with a lot of security and legal benchmarks to pass before they ever get published. If a casino tried to do this itself, then it would increase the overhead of running the business dramatically.
It would require a whole specialised team of personnel, from coders to graphic designers, to put this all together, as well as incurring extra costs of making a game legally compliant through agencies like eCOGRA, as releases have to be checked for operational game fairness.
A casino primarily banks its profits from the house edge that exists on games, but if they were developing them, those margins would unlikely be enough to make the process viable. So they turn to ready-made solutions from providers, something which also helps them provide variety to customers.
Variety
If a casino had to be responsible for developing its games, then it could only logistically provide a much smaller variety of slot and live dealer titles, due to cost factors. Yet most online casinos have hundreds of game options for their players, and that variety is important because it helps the platform to appeal to as many potential customers as possible.
The only way casinos can realistically build such comprehensive libraries is by calling on not just one iGaming provider, but many. That way, a casino can pool together all of the titles collectively from these different providers into one massive portfolio, and this is done at a fraction of the cost of having to have its dedicated team create hundreds of proprietary titles.
Using the Expertise
Not all iGaming game providers put their focus of expertise into the same area. The likes of Evolution Gaming and Playtech, for example, are heavily involved in creating and operating live dealer services, and they are known for being innovators in that area. Other developers like Quickspin will have a greater focus on classic slot machines, others, such as Microgaming, may zone in on jackpot slots and so on.
So a casino can call upon all that specialised expertise to ultimately end up giving their platform a higher quality feel with captivating content. They alone couldn’t compete with such a high degree of diversity and quality in games by doing it alone, considering that libraries have huge ranges of different slots, live dealer games, classic video table games and speciality games like instant wins, bingo and game shows.
Maintenance and Updates
Another big reason why casinos are happy to lean on iGaming providers is because of the costs involved in updates and maintenance. Any bug fixes which may occur in a game are then not down to the casino to fix, but on the iGaming operator.
Again, this is all about volume because if an online host has hundreds of titles all with the potential of having a hiccup, then it’s more cost-effective to leave that to others who have experience and a trusted track record of technical backend support.
Ready to Go
The pre-packaged options of games, therefore, make so much more sense for online casinos. Without the stresses of developing games themselves, it leaves the casino free to focus on the other sides of business operation and marketing. Casinos tend to rely on the leading providers for proven quality in the development and support of games.
The world of iGaming is all about specialisation. An iGaming software company may be great at developing games, but likely wouldn’t have the scope and capability of running them in a casino of its own, and vice versa. So, by leaning on external expertise, casinos can ultimately offer a superior product to customers by using iGaming developers, which minimises their own risk and costs.
