Casinos embrace esports, work to understand it

Associated Press

ATLANTIC CITY, N.J.

Casinos are slowly embracing competitive video-game tournaments as a way to help their bottom lines, but the money is coming from renting hotel rooms to the young players and selling them food and drinks, not from turning them into gamblers.

Like most other ways gambling halls have tried to attract millennials and their disposable income, it hasn’t been easy. Caesars Entertainment was first in the nation to adopt skill-based slot machines to woo millennials in Atlantic City, but bailed on them after a few months when the response was underwhelming. Other Atlantic City casinos still use them.

Competitive video-game tournaments, known as esports, are a growing industry around the world. The fast-paced action, vivid graphics and often violent on-screen action is catnip to millennials, the audience casinos are targeting as their core slot players grow old and die.

But it’s been difficult to move them from the video console to the craps table.

“Everybody’s still trying to figure out: How do you make this appealing for the consumer and make sense for the business? How do we all profit from this?” said Kevin Ortzman, Atlantic City regional president for Caesars Entertainment, which owns three casinos in the city.

The company in March hosted an esports tournament at Caesars that drew about 900 competitors and spectators. The bottom-line result was encouraging, if not dynamite.

Ortzman said coming up with ways to attract millennials is a necessity for the casino industry, adding that esports players could be cultivated to embrace casinos for video-game competitions the way their parents and grandparents went there to play slot machines.

Gambling requires discretionary income and free time, things that people starting their careers or families may not have in abundance, said David Schwartz, director of the Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas.