SBC News Voice of the Sports Betting Industry
For sector incumbents, 2018 will be remembered as the year of US market liberalisation, continued multi-billion M&A activity, record UKGC penalties, FOBTs reductions and strained relationships between betting and its wider stakeholders (media, the community, politics, governing bodies etc…)
Amid all this mayhem, the sector has seen little with regards to fresh blood, delivering much needed new propositions and perspectives.
Step forward Lars Lien, Chief Executive and Co-Founder of Luckbox, who in 2019 will lead the industry’s latest incumbent seeking to effectively bridge sports betting and esports dynamics.
“2019 promises to be a very busy and exciting year for us as we prepare for launch.” Lien details to SBC.
“We have said all along that we want our community to help shape the product and this will start in earnest in January, when our design team will harness the feedback of the Luckbox community and begin a series of user-tests and qualitative focus groups aimed at ensuring the Luckbox platform delivers the best possible online experience for our audience.”
During 2018, Lien and Luckbox’s enterprise executives have been busy reevaluating what betting’s proposition should be to esports fans. In its enterprise foundations, Luckbox seeks to deliver best-in-class esports fan engagements across all core value-chain components – platform, odds, data, information and marketing.
This reevaluation of betting-to-esports dynamics has seen Luckbox’s strike intriguing 2018 partnerships, with specialist esports data firm ABIOS developing a comprehensive esports match centre, and furthermore selecting Domicilium IOM as its network lead, tasked with delivering a tailored data centre for its business.
“Luckbox will launch a closed beta for more invited users and use information from this to inform our launch product” – Lien tells SBC.
“The main event for us in 2019 will be our full launch, for which we are targeting early in the year. This is when we will ramp up our marketing activities and really push to raise our profile.”
Mirroring the current realities of betting leadership in 2018 and beyond, Lien tells SBC that Luckbox’s enterprise team further seeks to set its start-ups ambitions on a global scale.
“Our current Isle of Man licence allows us to operate in many regions and it is our aim to hold a UK licence in 2019. However, a big ambition for Luckbox is to move into Asian markets, where we know the esports audience is huge.”
“While these are key milestones, the development of our product is an ongoing priority and our team will be constantly working on adding new features and fine-tuning existing offerings to bring us to the forefront of the esports betting space”.
