It was a great shock to hear that Genting had decided to cease all of their online operations in the UK earlier in July.
The Malaysian firm has decided to focus their business in other markets, retaining their high street casinos across Great Britain but ditching their popular online casino site, which will close its virtual doors on August 16.
However, there is some good news to report – SkillOnNet, the white label software firm with more than 3,000 games in their arsenal, has acquired the rights to the portal.
A new-look GentingCasino will be developed and could be available to gamers as soon as the autumn. Current Genting customers will be informed of their options soon, and their games can still be played up until that August 16 closing date.
The decision has been taken not to resurrect the Genting online sportsbook – unless another supplier comes along to rescue it.
Representatives from both Genting and SkillOnNet have been quiet about the deal, although the feeling is that the software firm has pulled off a masterstroke – they can trade off the Genting branding with a pretty much turnkey solution that will be a success straight out of the gate.
It’s hard to argue with their logic!
Who are SkillOnNet?
For many casual gamers, SkillOnNet may be a new name to you.
But they’ve been around in the industry for quite some time, and their prolific presence at the sector’s key awards – they’ve been nominated numerous times at EGR’s B2B Awards ceremony and at the SBC Awards – shows how well respected they are by their peers.
They develop their own slots and table games under the Green Valley Games (GVG) branding, and you may have come across some of them in your play – they are responsible for the likes of Ninja Master, Steam Punk and Vampires Feast.
The other string to their bow is in providing casinos with the software they need to operate, and in that guise they have a number of big clients in their network. PlayOjo, Slots Magic and LuckyVegas are just three of those, while in June they helped SlotStars launch – SkillOnNet’s Jerry Land declaring:
“We are the leaders when it comes to allowing new casino brands to enter regulated markets and succeed in the long term.”
It’s been a year of growth and upward expansion for the brand, and earlier in July they signed a flagship content deal with Playtech. That move will enable SkillOnNet to offer Playtech’s award-winning slots, table games and live dealer titles on their network, meaning that their clients who they power will benefit from a significant improvement in their respective game libraries.
Although that’s not to suggest that SkillOnNet’s offering is shabby as it is – they have numerous third party agreements in place with the likes of NetEnt, Microgaming, Yggdrasil and Evolution already.
GentingCasino will be one of the few occasions where they have taken the full project on themselves, however, and it will be interesting to see how they fare. With such a strong brand at their disposal, and with their own successes to call upon, it should make for an exciting new entrant into the online casino space.