The two sides of the compliance coin

Talking to people in our industry, there is a general feeling that having compliant marketing makes a lot of sense. We all know that there are years of material out there that needs cleaning up and the evidence we see is that most operators and affiliates are making inroads in to that. Not that we don’t see the odd serious breach of course but overall, we’re heading in the right direction.

The various regulatory authorities have been dishing out guidelines to drive the process and until now, pretty sensible ones on the whole I would suggest. The decisions may not always be popular but in general, it is easy to see the logic.

But one recent directive, to prevent free-to-play games being available without age pre-verification, strikes me as a double-edged sword. While the logic dictates that under 18s could go and play slots in “fun” mode during breaks from Fortnite, posting fish-lip selfies on social media and being influenced by a 20-something sales force, the UKGC is also closing a door on an adult market who are quite prepared to take some accountability for their actions.

By freezing out UK licensees from pages with free-to-play games they run the risk of emulating the post-UIGEA days of the US wild west when one door closed to licensed operators while at the same time another opened wide and welcomed in grey-market operators. As someone who used to run a free slot game affiliate site myself, I know that they can be very lucrative beasts and I suspect that many affiliates aren’t simply going to remove all the free-play games, not least because they help SEO. The ones at the top of their game are more likely in my opinion to keep the games up (we may even see a return to the counterfeit versions if developers block access), remove all the UK operators and replace them with unlicensed operators.

The social appeal

In addition, this action may also drive more players to social casinos, some of which lack the controls that the regulatory bodies impose on real-money operators and yet where it is just as easy to spend your money. I have played two very popular ones this month and neither appear to have age-verification, the ability to set card limits when buying coins or self-exclusion options. You can argue the first point by saying that Facebook et al would not allow access to under 18s, but can an operator assume that Facebook (for example) will be accountable if an issue arises? They are worryingly good too. I used to wonder why players would play social casinos where you can spend money but never cash out but having tried them for a few weeks, I now totally get it.

So where do the UKGC, ASA and other bodies draw the line? At what point does marketing compliance guidance become counter-intuitive to what they are trying to achieve? The DGE in New Jersey has the obvious answer: you license affiliates and you penalise operators who appear on affiliate pages alongside unlicensed operators, but the indications are that there are no plans to do that in the UK in the foreseeable future.

Aside from the affiliate issue, some players may find the grass greener on the other side. As someone who played online a lot in years gone by, I closed all my accounts when I sold my affiliate business. Were I to return now, I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t look for an unlicensed operator with a good reputation because I don’t want to go through KYC before I can play or make a bet so, speaking solely as a player, it’s already gone too far for me.

Ian Sims is the founder of Rightlander, a state-of-the-art affiliate compliance platform that allows affiliates and operators to identify potentially non-compliant content in regulated jurisdictions. Prior to establishing Rightlander, Sims was an egaming affiliate for 13 years.