SaaS as Business Technology in the Gaming Industry

Software‐as‐a‐service (SaaS) is a service delivery model used by some of the service providers to distribute their software-oriented services to the clients via a server. Example of SaaS is wider and includes Microsoft Office 365, Adobe Creative Cloud, Google Apps, Dropbox, and Amazon Web Services to name a few. The centralized manner of provision of software from a centralized server gives the guarantee of synchronous distribution of the present version of the software, eases the problems of scalability and even compatibility. Today, SaaS became one of the main applications of cloud computing. The general-purpose gaming and gambling industry is continuing to boom with the advent of technological progress. As SaaS is being used for email, financial and human resource management, customer relationship management, billing and collaboration, most of us would want to examine the possibility of profit from service delivery to the gambling industry.

SaaS for the land-based casinos and cruise ships

There are many different kinds of SaaS for the hospitality industry intended to be used by the hotels, various forms of casinos, restaurants, spa, and resorts. With technical progress, the gaming industry has extended into the non-gaming hospitality industry such as the cruise ships making the managing more challenging. There are SaaS which can offer property management systems, online bookings, reservations as well as provide advanced analytics solutions. Management of the remote security devices also requiring some form of SaaS. A well-known application in this category is internet-connected security cameras which can detect face, movement, abnormal behaviour and alert the management group. With the increasing penetration of the Internet of Things and Smart Devices, identifying and securing a legitimate guest has been easier. Furthermore, a moving vehicle on the sea requires assisted navigation which partially also requires SaaS.

SaaS for data analysis and machine learning

As discussed earlier in a separate article, gaming industry deals with both structured data and unstructured data. Source of the structured data is from the transaction records, website visits and so on depending on the type of the gambling business. Source of unstructured data can be from social media, comments, video feeds and so on. The casino gaming market is growing at a rapid pace at a CAGR of around 5% out of social paradigm shift. Thereby this industry is being forced to deliver different mixed experiences to attract and retain different segment of customers. With this increasing number of gambling attraction from the wider variety of clients, the industry is rapidly embracing advanced analytics to analyze what attracts the customers and advertise new offers. It is needless to state that the casinos need to detect and prevent fraud, thereby analytics and machine learning is becoming their major tool for predicting the fraudsters. In this way, the casino & gambling industry slowly becoming a data-driven industry and scope of the developers, professional engineers and entrepreneurs are increasing. Various traditional gaming tools such as slot machines are also reforming aided by different forms of learning.

Cloud gaming, server-based-gaming and gaming as a service

Gaming is a fast‐moving and highly competitive industry. The gambling games of today are no longer are monotonic 2D games. In 2019, GTA has opened an online casino where gamers can spend real money to win virtual dollars. The Diamond Casino & Resort has lavish amenities, shopping and state-of-the-art gaming. GTA is an example of how the casino industry is rapidly evolving eliminating the boundary between “gambling” and “gaming”.

3D casino games becoming extremely popular. Today, a wider range of 3D casino games has been a measurement of quality of the online and land-based casino. With the advent of cloud gaming, server-based-gaming and gaming as a service, the capital investment becoming lesser than it was 2 decades back. Several new online casino are featuring at least some basic 3D games such as Secrets of Cleopatra which can be played on any mobile devices.

SaaS in web development

The growth of online casinos has increased the need of web developers and various cloud services including SaaS. Web development for the casino industry is a complex procedure as there is need of integrating various fraud detection systems and payment gateways. Online casinos took to HTML5 like a duck to water. The need to allow the players to play from the mobile devices forced to used various cloud services which work on-demand. Function as service and database as a service significantly reduces capital expenditure.

Conclusion

The gaming industry of various form itself needs to value as much as the SaaS companies. The gaming industry is among a few industries which do not need employees for demonstration of the software, however, the industry is subjected to regulation. In the era of the sunrise of the online gambling industry, the SaaS companies and their developers should expect good growth in the future decades ahead. Data from Forrester shows that gamblers are more frequent users of mobile services. “Forrester believes that some gambling companies are among the players generating the most revenues out of mobile. The PMU generated €6.5 million via mobile as early as 2009, officially announced a 250% increase in mobile revenue for 2010, and now expects more than €30 million in mobile revenue for 2011”. The data-driven opinions pointing towards the need for more and more SaaS resources.