The Casino Esport Conference has grown up some as it enters its sixth year.
Instead of solely focusing on esports, as was the case in previous conferences, it’s been expanded to also look at the casino experience and what it should look like in the future to attract younger audiences who tend to be into esports.
Think science fiction – Back to the Future 2 and Star Wars with characters dressed in costumes, holograms, and virtual reality.
Hosted by founders Ben and Ari Fox, the CEC will be held March 23-24 at the Alexis Park Resort near the Virgin Hotels Las Vegas.
“We’re not just talking about esports now,” Ben Fox said. “It’s about changing spaces. We’re talking about a wider picture. It’s the total experience. We’ve grown up a little.”
Ari Fox calls the CEC a trailblazing conference focusing on everything that needs to be talked about post-pandemic, including the next generation of entertainment for casino patrons.
“What has been sped up by the pandemic is people engaging in these virtual worlds and in blockchain and cryptocurrency, and it’s happening at lightning speed,” Ari Fox said. “Malls and stores are building the metaverse. Casinos will be much more technology driven and have a much more futuristic experience.”
Not only brick-and-mortar casinos will be places for players to play and socialize, but and online casinos will too, Ari Fox said. He sees a video-gaming casino where patrons bet not only on blackjack and poker, but Dungeons & Dragons as well.
Ari Fox sees casinos using such technology as eye scanning and fingerprinting, devices that connect with a younger audience. Robots could wait on tables, holograms could help with reservations, and live staff serving cocktails could dress up as various video-game characters to reflect the influence on their culture, he said. “All of this is so important because during the pandemic, so many things became part of our world overnight,” Ari Fox said. “If those things are ignored moving forward, the casino industry will have a hard time pulling in new customers.”
The keynote speaker at the conference is Brian Mirakian, a senior principal and esports director for the Americas at Populous, a design firm that creates experiential environments. It designed the MSG Sphere entertainment venue in Las Vegas that will open in 2023.
“He’s going to talk about the need for not just connecting to the audience, but creating this immersive space that really delivers an experience,” Ari Fox said. “It’s obviously been done in Las Vegas before. They tore down all of the old casinos and rebuilt these massive experience-related places like Treasure Island, Bellagio, Luxor, and Venetian. That was geared for a demographic that is now aging out. The demographic that’s coming in must have way more technology experiences in these locations. If you walk through the Venetian, there’s a roof or ceiling that looks like the sky. With this younger audience, that same sky should be a gigantic screen that changes.”
The conference has a session on marketing to a younger demographic and what casinos mean to Millennials and Generation Zers. The session will also focus on how to change the narrative of a casino and its online platform to attract younger audiences.
Another session is about the metaverse and how it will affect brick-and-mortar casinos and their online platforms, especially as igaming expands across the country. It includes a discussion on whether casinos and their business model are too old to keep up with technology’s frantic pace and what a casino should do to make changes before it’s too late.
Another session will examine immersive experiences, such as holograms, virtual reality, and augmented reality, and what they mean for gambling.
Retailers are already attracting customers with three-dimensional avatars where a person can go and buy clothes and get them shipped while walking through the space, Ari Fox said.
“Should casinos adapt that same technology and have a metaverse of their casino?” Ari Fox asked. “Should Las Vegas create a metaverse of Las Vegas?”
When it comes to brick-and-mortar, a sportsbook is built with large screens and a place to buy beer and wings and other finger foods and watch the game, Ari Fox said. It will take more to lure in younger fans and esports fans, he said.
“The old generation of building a sportsbook and letting bettors watch on a massive screen is all you need when you’re talking about sports fans,” Ari Fox said. “If you’re talking about esports fans, much more is needed – an environment that has to be more of a sci-fi type of experience that would make them feel more comfortable wagering.”
Ben Fox said that how casinos are designed in the future will be very different. The Stratosphere and New York-New York were built with rollercoasters, but that’s not needed in future iterations.
“All you need to incorporate is VR, so the experience is there, but the cost and space to facilitate something like this are far smaller, even for a brick-and-mortar property,” Ben Fox said.
CEC connects the esports and video-gaming players, marketers, developers, products, services, event providers, lawyers and educators to the casino, cinema, and collegiate worlds.
You can see the agenda at this link.
