Giuseppe Donato, Italy country manager at Kiron Interactive, believes that virtual sports is progressing from being just a simulation towards becoming a more general type of digital entertainment, realist features, the ability to play at any time and habitual use across multiple channels all occupying a similar space.

Virtual sports were based on imitation. Football resembled football, racing resembled racing, and the more accurate the simulation was in relation to the real thing, the better it was. Giuseppe Donato believes that this assumption is starting to break down.

“For many years, the objective of virtual sports was to replicate the experience of real sport and sports betting,” he says. “The search for realism was therefore fundamental.”

This remains the case with football and other well-known sports. Kiron is still investing in products based on recognition. Meanwhile, products like Rodeo take a different approach. Kiron refers to Rodeo as a kind of blend between virtual sports and crash mechanics, focusing on a bull rider attempting to stay on for as long as possible. There is no real-world league to reproduce and no sporting calendar to wait for.

“We should stop considering virtual sports exclusively as an alternative to live sport,” Donato says. “They can become an autonomous form of digital entertainment, built around speed, simplicity, immediacy and engagement.”

Realism still has a place

Donato is noticing two demands emerging simultaneously. One of these is a desire for familiarity. In Italy, football provides an obvious means of accessing virtual content since the audience is already familiar with the teams, the competitions and the basic principles of betting.

“Linking a virtual product to a real competition creates an immediate level of recognition and engagement,” he says.

Kiron is also focusing on that segment of the market; its GOAL Premier product features familiar league structures, motion-captured football and a wide variety of betting markets, meanwhile the company is still developing football content meant to be included alongside the live sports schedule.

The second requirement is quite the opposite: digital users are becoming more used to products which have no corresponding real-world presence.

“The opportunity is not to choose between realism and innovation, but to offer both,” Donato says.

Sportsbook and casino are becoming less tidy

This shift causes traditional product categories to appear less distinct.

In the view of an operator, the sportsbook and the casino still have commercial and regulatory significance. However, Donato believes that they matter less to the player.

“A user can enter the sportsbook because they want to bet on football, move to virtual football when there are no live events and then try an instant-win product because they want a faster experience,” he says.

Kiron has now included virtual sports, instant-win games and number games as part of the same wider range of offerings. The way it presents its online content is to show virtual entertainment as something which can be used to fill the gaps between live sports events and also as a form of standalone entertainment.

Donato doesn’t think that sportsbooks and casinos will vanish. He believes that operators should pay more attention to how users move between different formats and less attention to treating each individual area as a closed-off environment.

The competition is now the wider digital experience

“Users no longer compare one betting product only with another betting product,” Donato says. “They compare the overall digital experience with everything they use every day on their smartphone.”

The benchmark is then altered since speed, visual quality and immediate feedback all come into the competitive arena. Virtual sports have a clear advantage as they do not rely on a live event starting at a specific time.

In Italy Donato considers this especially important during the breaks in the football schedule or when there is less live content. Virtual products are available continuously and can be used through both online and retail channels.

The idea that virtual sports had mainly served as a filler item between live events he now regards as out of date.

“In Italy we have seen how important it is to develop a genuinely omnichannel offer,” he says.

At SiGMA Central Europe Donato also made the same argument about the difficulty of treating land-based and online gaming as entirely separate businesses.

Innovation still has to look like gambling

It raises another question as a result of the shift towards shorter sessions and more game-like mechanics.

Donato makes it clear that drawing on digital entertainment should not make it more difficult to recognise the gambling aspect of the product.

“Innovation must never mean making the gambling nature of the experience less recognisable,” he says.

The age controls, regulatory requirements and responsible-gaming principles will therefore still form part of the product even though the interfaces and mechanics change.

For Donato, the following stage is not one of giving up on sport; it is about expanding the potential of virtual content. While some products will continue to move towards more familiar competitions, others will make use of mechanics that are much more naturally associated with digital entertainment.

According to him, Kiron’s challenge is not any longer just to produce more content but to understand what users want at different times and to create experiences that are effective both online and in retail.

Virtual sports might still attempt to copy reality, even if they no longer need to rely on it.