Interview: Fanatics Chief Product Officer Scot McClintic on Their Upcoming Pennsylvania Launch
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Pennsylvania’s online casino market is already super competitive, with 21 licensed operators. And it’s about to get even more crowded in a few weeks, with the launch of Fanatics.
Gambling.com caught up with Fanatics’ Chief Product Officer Scot McClintic, who took us through a rundown of the new sports betting and PA online casino app, which he says will go live the second-to-last or last week of January. They have a licensing agreement on the retail side with Hollywood Casino York, owned by Penn Entertainment, one of their many casinos.
“We don’t see anything getting in the way, launching in that timeframe,” he said.
Fanatics is in the middle of an aggressive U.S. rollout. By the end of the January, they will be operating in 11 states: Connecticut, Colorado, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Maryland, Ohio, Tennessee, Virginia, Vermont, West Virginia, as well as Pennsylvania.
Two Years in The Making
They’ve spent two years building their own sports betting and casino technology and acquired the U.S. businesses of PointsBet in 2023 to accelerate the rollout in the sports betting space, and say they plan to acquire customers “in a very efficient and cost-effective manner,” the company said in a statement, that they won’t be engaging in “spending wars” to acquire “every customer.”
“We wanted to find a way to make sports betting and casino gaming more accessible to customers akin to the way that customers use other apps in their daily lives, like Airbnb, Spotify, Uber, and make the experience very accessible,” McClintic added.
Building A Casino Platform That a Casino-Only Player Would Want to Engage With
Sports betting is the focus for Fanatics. Through that, casino will be an “immersive experience, less of the standard tile pile and more focused on different experiences embedded in a more standard casino format that try to draw the user in and encourage exploration,” McClintic told us. “There’s a lot of inspiration there. We've hired a bunch of folks from HBO Max and other companies like that, that take a different perspective to what high volume content and content navigation should be to engage the customer to make it feel like the experience is very easy, even though there's a ton of content sitting behind the scenes.
“So, you’ll see new games, trending slots, lots of collections and categories of different games, plans for live dealers … engaging animation … so we’ll try to flex different muscles to engage customers.”
The bottom line, according to McClintic: “From a philosophical point of view, we've taken the tack that we want our casino to be so good that it can be a standalone casino product that a casino-only player would want to engage with, versus a, this is just something under the sportsbook, you're only focused on sportsbook customers, you're not focused on casino customers.
“We've philosophically never taken that tact in any part of the app or any part of the product experience.”
Having Their Own Game Studio
McClintic referenced a future a standalone casino experience that is geared even more so to PA online casino players, but for the time being it is nested within the sportsbook.
“But one of the major bets that we've made … is a need to differentiate not only on UI/UX (design), and bonusing and promos, but also differentiating on content,” he said. “So, we have an internal game studio called Fanatics Game Studios. We've released our first game called Fanatics Blackjack, live in West Virginia, and will be coming to Pennsylvania as well. This is single deck blackjack. Very standard. We're going to be rolling out additional variants of this type of blackjack game, think multi hand, side bets etc. As well as a couple additional types of games like crash games, other table games. You can imagine us getting into slots as well. I really believe in differentiated content, and we’re really focused on high-quality content.”
Customers can earn fan cash rewards sports betting and playing the casino games. McClintic said via the studio they’ll have a minimum three games out on the market by March, and more rolled out throughout the year.
“We don't want casino to be an afterthought,” he said. “We want it to have an equal spot at the table alongside sports, even though Fanatics is a sports-first brand, with a heritage in sports.”
Q: How Much of A Priority Will Online Casino Be For Fanatics?
“The on-average metric is for every dollar of sportsbook GGR there is in the state there's two times as much casino revenue. So, it's in our best interest to make sure we're building products for that demographic. We have heard from customers that one of the key areas of dissatisfaction on casinos specifically is it feels like an afterthought. It feels like you built this because people are bored during halftime of an NFL game. It doesn't feel like you've actually built a product with my needs in mind.
So that's been at least in my mind, there's always going to be an equal seat at the table for casino. So, as we go live in PA it's like we're not going to be successful if we're crushing it on sports but not crushing it on casino and vice versa. And we take that same mindset into other casino and sportsbook markets like New Jersey, Michigan, etc. So, from a business perspective, we obviously want to see casino to be successful but as a product person, I want to make sure we're satisfying the needs of that casino-first demographic.
“So even if you're a casino-first customer that's never heard of Fanatics before, you land in the casino, and you're like, wow, this is awesome. They've been very thoughtful about the needs of that guy. And they've solved those needs in advance versus me having to be unhappy, bet with my feet and leave. And only then does the operator react and say, wow, we're losing customers now, and I wonder why. So that's front and center for us as we think about the way that we build products and solving the casino customer needs.
Q: What Are Your Thoughts On The Pennsylvania Online Casino Market Going In?
“Pennsylvania is super competitive, especially with a lot of operators in the market, Caesars, MGM, casino-first brands. Then you’ve got FanDuel and DraftKings, sports-first, but with a very good cross-sell strategy. I think for us the way to think about it just being very pragmatic despite how competitive it is. Every other operator had a four-year head start, and so for us building over the last 16 months, I think we've caught up quite a bit. Do we have room to go to catch up? Absolutely.
“But that infrastructure that we built out on both sports and casino is going to allow us to close that gap that has existed by operators being able to have a multi-year head start. And so, what you will see from us in terms of casino, Day 1 in Pennsylvania, it will look completely different a year from now, because of the investments that we've made that are going to take a little bit of time to ultimately make their way to customers. But you know, our bet that we made is despite how competitive it is Day 1 we're in this for the long run. Customers are going to feel that Fanatics differentiation over the next year and beyond.
“I am excited by the opportunity to compete finally. Pennsylvania is my home state. So, I'm very happy to bring this product to market. Customers understand who Fanatics is, what it’s all about. We want to lean into that. Yes, it’s going to help us acquire customers. But we’re not going to win on brand recognition. In the end the product needs to win the day. If you’re a casino player, you’re going to vote in your mind based on two reasons: One, how is the loyalty program? And two, how good is the product?
“We think we've got an amazing opportunity from a loyalty program perspective, given the ecosystem of Fanatics and all the different types of utility the Loyalty Program has, but even with that, if we don't have all the titles you want, if we don't have some really cool innovative in-house content that you can't get anywhere else, and if we don't have a really good experience that allows you to get to the games you want quickly, then we're not going to win. We think about that as a one-two punch. And you know, to the point about competition, MGM and Caesars have fantastic loyalty programs. So, I think, we don't have a right to win, we are trying to out-compete the competition from a product and a loyalty perspective, and we think we're on the right path to do that.”
Q: And What Can Customers Expect To See Day 1?
“There'll be hundreds of games, there will be in-house content, so Fanatics Blackjack, followed by additional games that we will roll out from Fanatics Game Studios. You will get the search functionality, you will get the lobby, free spins, and then from there, we're going to be rolling out new loyalty currencies for customers like casino bonus cash. I would say the things that customers are most accustomed to seeing from sports-first, casino brands, they're going to get, but once again, that's just the beginning. The magical moment for us will be when a casino customer comes in and says you've solved all of my casino-first needs. I forgot you even had a sportsbook.
“I talk all the time with our head of game development. When you build games, games win the details, in the trenches, the details matter. You think about what it took to bring Fanatics Blackjack to life - how the card comes out, the gravity of the card flipping out, the speed of the card flipping out, the actual pixel by pixel, what the card designs are. There's easter eggs buried all over the place. How much time does it take for a dealer to check if they've got blackjack or not? That’s the way video game companies think about game development and game ideation. The details matter. Customers might not see or fully conceptualize all the details and all the kinds of minute things that we tried to get right in the day-to-day experience, but they will implicitly feel it. It will feel more premium. It'll feel higher quality.”
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