The growth of esports over the last few years has been somewhat inescapable. The vertical enjoyed a huge rise in popularity throughout the pandemic, and with that showing no sign of slowing down, many betting companies are starting to realise its true potential. Those promising signs were a main focus of conversation for BETER CEO Gal Ehrlich at the recent SBC Summit Barcelona,
He said: “Esports is one of our fastest growing products in the BETER portfolio. We have expanded quite impressively over the past few years. Esports is a disruptive event in this industry, it attracts a completely different audience.
“Younger people started watching and playing esports like CS:GO, DOTA 2, League of Legends. But now that they’re growing up, not only do they want to play esports, but they also want to bet on it. This is their form of entertainment.
“We’re seeing a growing segment of players onboarding every year. For some of our customers, that will only be about 20%, even more, of the overall turnover is coming from esports.
“I believe that in the next few years, we’re going to see this trend of expanding their share in the overall betting market. For us with our product, this is the right time [to grow].
“We started out around four years ago, we managed to build a great network and we’re working with some of the most prominent suppliers in this industry to make sure that we’re getting real time data to provide the best quality product for our customers. This is probably going to be our biggest growth and revenue generator for years to come.”
Conversation soon turned towards the announcement earlier this year that Twitch would be taking a “deep-dive look into gambling behaviour on its platform”.
With the streaming provider having already issued an outright ban on unlicensed gaming sites across its platform, questions have been raised over whether Twitch could crack down even further on any gambling-related content.
This could, say industry observers, have considerable knock-on effects for slots streamers, and possibly esports streamers.
When pressed on whether he thought the potential crackdown could impact the development of the esports betting sector, Ehrlich continued: “So when it comes to Twitch, we’re not engaged with them commercially in any way. We do stream some of our content, but only for fans to consume.
“Twitch will always be a significant player [in the growth of esports] – it’s part of the community, part of the esports ecosystem. We’ll always find ways to collaborate with them as part of our social network exposure, but I don’t think that it will have much of an impact on us whatsoever.”
Watch the full interview HERE.
This interview was originally published on SBC News.
