A well established I-gaming supplier has unveiled a turnkey online bingo platform that it says could eclipse its casino gaming business.
Boss Media announced the launch of Bingo Arena, its bingo portal and turnkey bingo platform, on Thursday. Peter Bertilsson, the Stockholm-based company's CEO, said bingo has the potential to reach a wider audience than blackjack, roulette and other online casino staples.
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"I wouldn't be surprised if bingo became our most important product in the future."
- Peter Bertilsson
Boss Media
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"I wouldn't be surprised if bingo became our most important product in the future," Bertilsson said. "Bingo and scratch lotteries are games that people really enjoy. Up to now, gambling on the
Internet has been mainly about casino games and PC games."
The Sweden-based company, which has grossed more than SEK 500 million since embarking on gambling software design in 1997, expects bingo to be one of the fastest growing activities on the Internet.
Boss's portal site, www.bingoarena.com, features four types of bingo: Big Ben bingo, a 90-ball British-style game; Golden Gate bingo; Acropolis bingo, a more European-style game; and Taj Mahal bingo. The site also offers games to keep players occupied between rounds, such as tic-tac-toe and scratch cards.
Ulrika Persson, the company's investor relations manager, spoke to IGN about the software at the Global Gaming Expo in Las Vegas in September. The product, she said, will be available to both current Boss licensees and new customers, and is customizable if the buyer would rather have it branded as something other than Bingo Arena. She said the idea behind the portal site is to have all the licensees who choose to take part engaged in a community so that players from multiple sites are contributing to the same progressive jackpots.
"We want to create a bingo network," she said. "Already existing customers will be able to buy the software and link to the same server."
She pointed out, though, that clients can also choose to have their site separated from the Boss bingo network.
The software, which took about six months to develop, is easier to design than casino games because there are fewer variables, Persson said.
One of the site's unique features is its ability to subscribe to certain cards, so that if a player is offline, and even if his computer is off, his games are still being played. Players can also select "auto-dobb" and play other games as the computer automatically plays the bingo card(s).
"You can do anything you like during that time because it will tell you when it's bingo," Persson said.
Bertilsson, in a press release, said there is a game called Bingolotto in Sweden that, through its popularity, showed Boss Media how wide an audience bingo can attract. Bingolotto, said Persson, is broadcast on television on Saturday nights in Sweden, and the players who tune in have bought tickets throughout the week.
"What we know from Bingolotto in Sweden is that it can become very big," she said.