Fire Lightning

How to play Fire Lightning

August was a difficult month for casinos in the Mid-Atlantic, as gaming revenue declined in Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.

This week, Casino.org reported on Atlantic City’s difficulties in August, where in-person casino revenue slowed 5.5% to $294.9 million.

The Mid-Atlantic struggles weren’t limited to New Jersey, as Pennsylvania revealed today (Sept. 17) that brick-and-mortar gross gaming revenue (GGR) from slot machines and table games totaled $280.3 million.

What is Fire Lightning?

“I don’t think the successful studio of the future necessarily has hundreds of people,” he says. “It could be a relatively small group of extremely talented people with great ideas, strong brands and a very good understanding of players, supported by technology that does much of the heavy lifting.”

That would also shift the basis on which studios compete. If sophisticated development capabilities become accessible to a wider range of creators, scale alone becomes less of an advantage.

“It becomes less about how many developers you employ and much more about how creative you are and how well you understand the player,” Curwen says.

How to play Fire Lightning

The CEO highlighted the synergies between Sun International’s land-based and online operations, with the potential of capturing more of its existing customers’ online activity.

“We look increasingly at our business as one customer ecosystem or one customer platform, if you will,” he added. “I keep saying that SunBet probably wouldn’t be where it is today without a land-based business, and a land-based business probably wouldn’t be where it is today without SunBet.

“We continuously leverage off one another. Now, having said that, we know that almost all of us, or at least the vast majority of our land-based customers are playing online, but not all of them are playing with SunBet, so we see that bit as the opportunity.”