Halloween was particularly spooky this year for Spribe, the igaming studio behind seminal crash game Aviator. It probably sent shivers down the spines of a few operators, too, when Aviator was suspended in the UK.
In a surprise twist of fate, the game studio that had previously been flying high across the globe found it had unwittingly been on a collision course with the Gambling Commission of Great Britain for half a decade.
On 30 October, the GC suspended the supplier’s license (which had been granted in December 2020) with immediate effect “due to serious non-compliance with the hosting requirements of our licensing framework”. Eeeek.
The GC’s notice of the suspension didn’t mince its words. “We have clearly communicated to the operator that all hosting activity must stop immediately unless and until a suitable hosting licence is obtained,” it said.
“Under Section 33 of the Gambling Act 2005, it is a criminal offence to provide facilities for gambling in Great Britain without a licence from the Gambling Commission, unless a specific exemption applies.”
While Spribe has had a remote-software-supplier license for several years, it does not hold the hosting license it has needed all these years to host its own games. Needless to say, the supplier is now hurriedly trying to secure one.
Once the application process is complete and it has been granted, Aviator should rise again to the top of the UK’s casino-games rankings. But there’s a lesson to be learnt here: Don’t overlook the boring bits of business.
Aviator has been a runaway success. Unsurprisingly, all the attention has been on the game, the innovation, the unique mechanics, and its massive popularity. Did this lead everyone working on delivery of the game to overlook the regulatory fundamentals? It seems so.
In its statement on the license suspension, the regulator went onto explain that it “takes a robust approach to unlicensed gambling activity and always expects the highest standards of compliance and integrity from its licensees”. In this case, the ball was massively dropped, arguably not just by the supplier.
In a response to the suspension on 31 December, Spribe said: “We acknowledge the UKGC’s announcement and are taking this matter extremely seriously. We are working diligently to resolve the issue as swiftly as possible.”
It continued: “It only came to our attention last week from the UKGC that, due to our technical setup, we need to add a hosting license to our existing one. Until we obtain this license, the Commission, at its discretion, opted to suspend our current remote-operating license. We are taking all necessary steps to comply with the Commission’s requirements in order to reinstate the delivery of Aviator to the UK market.”
According to BetComply co-founder and Chief Compliance Officer Mike de Graaff, suppliers needing a hosting license is not particularly common. More often, operators host the games themselves, but in this case, the games are hosted by Spribe and operators plug in. What de Graaff and others in the industry over the last couple of weeks have found surprising is that the supplier, all the operators, and the GC missed this oversight for so long.
De Graaff can’t think of another example of a supplier having gone live with a game before an oversight like this was picked up. It appears that all the excitement around Aviator’s success may have eclipsed some of the basic due diligence that should have happened around getting the game live.
Aside from the supplier’s failure to obtain the correct licenses, there is also an expectation by the regulator that operators have checked that their suppliers are meeting requirements. In theory, operators that offered Aviator to punters when it wasn’t fully licensed could receive a slap on the wrist too, although de Graaff suggests this is unlikely at this point.
He does, however, believe that there is a greater chance now that the regulator will be looking closely at supplier licenses in case any similar oversights have been made elsewhere. His advice to anyone that might have fallen into the same trap? Double check.
“When suppliers come to us with these new innovative games that are hybrid or new ideas, we first do a product-assessment report,” he says. “We actually analyse the products. What does it do? What’s the infrastructure and how is it classified?”
He suggests this should be the first port of call for anyone looking to license innovative or new games. “Otherwise, people just start assuming it’s a casino game or sport game.”
For Spribe, the hope is that they will have the correct licenses by the end of the year and be back up and running. That’s if the GC can greenlight the new license quicker than it spotted it was missing.
