Casino eSports Conference founders Ben and Ari Fox said interest has quadrupled as the two-day event enters its third year at Luxor Las Vegas. The brothers said they believe the casino and video game industries are coming together to take eSport to another level.
Clarion Gaming has taken over the management of the conference, Sept. 4-5, which connects the casino world with eSports players, marketers, developers, product, services, event providers, lawyers and educators.
Past conferences have helped casinos across the country incorporate eSports as an amenity in their facilities. This year’s conference is titled “For the New Era of Gaming” with online and land-based casinos along with the eSports industry working to map out a future that creates and grows profits.
“This year is very historic because it’s taken three years to bring the two sides together,” Ben Fox said. “That’s the video game world and casino world. It’s been a struggle. The casino industry believes they’re the Golden Child and that everybody wants to work with them, and the video game industry didn’t want anything to do with them because it has underage players. We’re putting that to bed with this coming together – that taboo has been broken with major publishers and the casino industry. The casino industry has only used it for entertainment so far, but they’re ready to move it to the next level with gaming.”
A major computer game publisher will participate in the conference for the first time with J Moses, interactive director of Take Two, serving as a keynote speaker talking about the future of eSports betting. Take Two with its labels Rockstar and 2K publishes the Grand Theft Auto series and NBA 2K.
Moses is also director of the ReadyUp platform launched by Johnathan Wendel, an eSports legend who’s known as Fatal1ty, who will also join him in the discussion. Fox said he was the first player to earn more a $1 million playing eSports.
There will be mixers with gamers and competitions during the two-day event that has the most immersive conference of the three years it’s been held, Ben Fox said.
The conference will look at the regulator landscape of eSports around the world, what’s happening in the U.S. on the legislative level and what have been the best practices internationally. Speakers will talk about changing casino space for new technology and games that are and will be available and how to integrate eSports into the sports book. That includes iGaming and rising mobile eSports competitions and how online books are involved.
There will be a discussion about partnerships between sports teams and leagues and how it’s extended to eSports. Panelists will talk about prevention of match fixing and preserving integrity.
Panelists will also talk about casinos marketing to video gamers, the demographics of gamers and how they related to the casino market, what the revenue streams are for casinos, and opportunities in computer game streaming.
Funding eSports teams and projects and other investments in the industry will highlight the conference. There are investment opportunities with creating web sites that serve as gaming platforms for peer-to-peer play, Ari Fox said. That can be an incubator and cross pollination of the two industries, he said.
The speed at which this is taking shape is incredible, according to the Fox brothers whose company is Gamecon. The first year was “a murmur,” the second year was “we don’t see how we can make money or why this is important” and now “it’s how to really make money off this,” they said.
“After this event a lot of things are going to change very rapidly,” Ben Fox said. “In both the gaming world and video game world you will see them come together.”
The video gaming side had long said they didn’t want anything to do with the word casino, said Fox who said they’ve spent a lot of time working with both sides of the industry, especially the video gaming side.
“What changed is that their biggest fear is they will lose massive amounts of business because they’re going to be regulated as loot boxes and skins,” Ben Fox said. “The regulators are starting to come down on the in-purchase game play. Now the guys running the studio are saying now ‘what are we going to do. We are going to have to talk to the world.’ That’s why you are finding this happening. It’s a massive win for us, the casino industry and video game industry. I would say we have come a long way, and Clarion gets the credit for raising the volume and legitimizing what we are doing. “You can see evidence of that.”
Tickets are available for $799, but the $200 discount ends on August. 9th.
For more information, https://registration.n200.com/survey/03k1ykkgxdz0b.
