About this app
About Prost
“Because you’re a small business, you need to pick your battles,” Wilson says. “I can’t go and get 10 licences this year. It’s just unrealistic. It would require so much work that it would distract us. Now we have that ability through our relationship with RubyPlay, and we are grabbing that opportunity with both hands.”
There is also a natural product opportunity. Splash Tech has traditionally been weighted towards sports within free-to-play, while RubyPlay brings a substantial casino ecosystem. For Wilson, the agreement creates a chance for Splash Tech to bring its distinctive engagement thinking into the RubyPlay world, planting a seed for future products that combine Splash Tech’s free-to-play and jackpot expertise with RubyPlay’s content ecosystem, market knowledge and distribution reach.
For RubyPlay, Splash Tech supplies a way to move beyond games and towards a broader content-and-engagement proposition. For Splash Tech, RubyPlay supplies the reach to take already proven products further. And for operators, the value is practical: a flexible engagement layer that can sit across casino, sportsbook and third-party content, reduce operational complexity and create more reasons for players to keep coming back.
What is Prost?
The law came at the request of Full House Resorts, the Las Vegas-based regional gaming operator that expressed interest in relocating its Rising Star Casino in Rising Sun to a more attractive market, specifically in the northeastern part of the state.
During the lawmaking process, Full House’s exclusivity was stripped in favor of welcoming any company currently licensed as a commercial casino in the US to bid on the possible license. Lawmakers also threw in a one-time $150 million fee for the concession and a mandatory investment minimum of $500 million, all but ending Full House’s interest.
“The bill changed many times. We make money in Rising Sun. We always have, not a lot of money, but we make money. We continue to make money in Rising Sun. And we will continue to do that for our shareholders, as well as for the good of the state,” Full House CEO Daniel Lee said in March.
How to play Prost
He points to Macau’s Cotai Strip and Singapore’s Marina Bay Sands and Resorts World Sentosa as examples of how regulatory discipline can coexist with considerable freedom for developers to innovate. “At its core, Japan’s policies need to be pragmatic and allow for developments to succeed – not constrain them to the point that they risk failure.”
When asked which operator will be willing to take the risk and ultimately win Japan’s next “licence lottery”, Klebanow contends that it depends on how restrictive – or attainable – the regulations and requirements imposed by the government will be.
“If policymakers once again impose onerous policies that limit a property’s profit potential, then most developers will not take the risk of investing upwards of $10 billion in an IR development,” says Klebanow.
