Ash Gaming Playtech

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Playtech - World's Biggest Supplier of Casino Games

Ash Gaming Founded in 2002, leading games studio Ash Gaming was acquired by Playtech in 2011, producing some of the group’s most popular titles since, including Ace Ventura, Classic TV Batman, Gladiator: Road to Rome and Leprechaun’s Luck. After 2010 Playtech has bought the leading games aggregator, GTS, the biggest Bingo provider in the UK, Virtue Fusion, The online slot and casino game developer, Ash Gaming, the leading mobile gaming enabler, Mobenga, the affiliate marketing specialist, PTTS, the provider of management systems, Intelligence Gaming, the sports betting provider, Geneity and the VLT systems provider Aristocrat Lotteries.

Playtech, the biggest supplier of online casino gaming software solutions, is floated on the London Stock Exchange. It is famous for its value added, cutting edge solutions.

How It All Began: A team of entrepreneurs hailing from the software engineering, casino gaming, and multimedia industries launched Playtech at Taru Estonia in 1999. The vendor got its first licensee in 2001 and began to grow very fast. Today, its portfolio contains dynamic products such as bingo network, land-based casino solutions, mobile gaming services, live casino, and videobet.

Playtech became a publicly traded company in 2006. The same year, the vendor expanded into Bulgaria. In later years, the provider launched its online sports betting software and entered the regulated markets of Serbia, Estonia, Spain, and Italy.

Strategic Acquisitions: Playtech started signing strategic acquisition deals from 2010. It acquired GTS, the game aggregator; Virtue Fusion, UK’s biggest bingo provider; Ash Gaming, a top provider of online casino games; Mobenga, a supplier of mobile gaming solutions; PTTS, a specialist in affiliate marketing; and Intelligence Gaming, a management systems supplier. In 2012, the company acquired Geneity, UK’s leading provider of sports betting solutions.

Playtech Now: Today, the company has its headquarters in the Isle of Man and employs more than 5000 talented people worldwide. Playtech's research and development centres are spread across 14 countries.

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Playtech offers an impressive portfolio of 13 products. In addition, operators can avail of invaluable services such as customer support, banking, fraud prevention, hosting, payment advisory, live dealer services, marketing, and network management.

Here is a brief overview of some of the products in the Playtech portfolio:

Information Management Solution: Called IMS for short, this is a collection of tools that all operators require to successfully run an online gambling business.

Casino: The casino combines top-notch gaming content with sophisticated technology. The library, which contains more than 500 games, is easy to integrate into existing systems. Every year, Playtech releases more than 50 new games into the industry. Many Playtech games are created as a result of deals signed with third party brands such as HBO, Warner Bros, NBC Universal, and MGM.

Content (EdGE): This product is a library of poker games, bingo games, and online casino games. Since it offers gaming content from over 25 providers, it can boast the world's largest library of games. Since all the content is easily made available on a single platform, the games become easy to access with just one user account.

Sportsbook: Playtech's online sports betting product includes a mobile sportsbook and a virtual racing simulator.

Poker: Playtech's poker product is available on the iPoker network, which features amazing promotions, large bonuses, fraud prevention, and 24/7 support. Operators can also use Playtech's poker widgets to offer mini games and other poker-related products.

The iPoker network attracts more than 35,000 players at peak times. This is not surprising when you consider the fact that it features a huge selection of promotions, which includes regular tournaments with a guaranteed prize pool that exceeds £10 million every month.

In addition, Playtech has dedicated poker networks for Finland, Serbia, Spain, France, and Italy.

Online Bingo: The acquisition deal Playtech signed with Virtue Fusion enables it to offer one of the best online bingo products in the world. This product includes life-transforming prizes, plenty of mini games, and management tools. Operators can customize the product as they please to offer a unique bingo site that fully suits their brand.

Social Gaming: Playtech is famous for its social casino, poker, and bingo games, available in as many as seven languages. This product allows players to meet friends from different parts of the world.

Unique Features of Playtech

• Play Playtech games across multiple channels
• Unique branded slots
• Games loaded with unique bonus features

Playtech was the creator of casino favourites such as Gladiator, Age of Gods and Great Blue. They were the first to develop comic hero slots through a licensing deal with Marvel, but that relationship came to an end in 2017. Players were quite disappointed as this meant that popular titles like Iron Man, The Hulk and Punisher were removed from all Playtech casinos. Fortunately, the company signed a new deal with Warners Bros to develop games around brands like The Suicide Squad and Justice League. See video preview below.

Playtech's mobile casino gaming product is called The Mobile Hub, created in collaboration with Mobenga (the mobile experts) in 2012. It is based on technology that allows operators to offer not only Playtech's mobile gaming content, but also mobile games from third party providers on a single platform. Since the software is based on a foundation of HTML5, players do not have to download any native gaming app to access the games on their smartphone or tablet browsers.

Live Dealer Gaming - Dedicated Live Dealer Games

Playtech's live dealer software powers a number of prominent Asian and European online gambling sites. The live gaming action is streamed in top quality from sophisticated gaming studios. Playtech has also launched dedicated tables with native-speaking live croupiers for players from Spain, Italy, and UK. In addition, Playtech's live dealer platform is compatible with desktops, smartphones, and tablets.

Playtech also offers a selection of TV games. Available only in Spain, Italy, and the UK, they combine the best elements of casino gaming with a live game show. Players can access the TV games through voice telephony, SMS, TV app, mobile remote controller, and web interface.

The news section of Playtech's official website is packed with stories of Playtech bagging industry awards. Here are just a few of the awards conferred on Playtech:

• Aim to Main Award at Grand Thornton Quoted Company Awards
• Top trophy at Global Gaming Awards of 2016
• Three headline awards at eGR B2B Awards of 2016
• International Corporate Event Awards for ICE 2016
• Four eGaming Review B2B Awards for Best Bingo, Poker, Slots, and Mobile

Playtech Acquires Ash Gaming

Back in December 2011, Playtech concluded a deal which saw them acquiring Ash Gaming and its entire portfolio of games.

Ash Gaming Portfolio

Ash Gaming came to the fore in 2002 when they offered to design software that was specifically tailored to each client in the online gaming industry. From that time, Ash Gaming has grown to developing games that are rich in graphics and are not only enticing to players, but are financially beneficial for all their clients. The quality that Ash Gaming produces has not only captured a corner of the online gaming market, but it has also put them up there with the leaders in this field.

They are known to be innovative and inventive and produce games that are not only graphically superior but also come from a solid platform for sustainability and productivity.

Operators Using the Software

Virgin Casino, Sky Bingo, Betfred Bingo, Lotto and Games, Virgin Bingo, Mecca Games, The Spin Room, Gala Bingo and Gala Casino have all integrated Ash Gaming software into their online casino.

Other Products

Ash Gaming offers virtual horse racing, dog racing games and fixed odds games together with a host of very well patronised slot games such as Slot Blox, Amazon Wild, Pharaoh's Treasure, Alice's Wonderland, King Arthur, Tubik's Slots, Around the world, Rich and Famous, Top of the Slots, The War of the Worlds and many more.

General Information

Playtech Online Casinos

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Overview

Playtech is currently one of the biggest Software Providers out there, with more than 5000 employees worldwide, spread over offices in 17 Countries, but they started quite small, back in 1999 – somewhere in a tiny office in Tartu, Estonia. They launched their first Casino pretty soon thereafter – in 2001 – and have been growing steadily since. One of their strong-points, is the fact that they have bought up, or integrated a lot of smaller Software Providers or other specialized Software Companies (such as Ash Gaming, IGS, Mobenga, PTTS, Eyecon, Virtue Fusion and Quickspin – and the list goes on) into their ‘mothership’, so to speak: this enabled them to grow rapidly in the last decade, and as such it’s no wonder you’ll find their Games in almost every corner of the Online Gaming Market.

Their range of products is very broad, as they now offer more than 600 Games across multiple channels, amongst which are Slots, Poker, Table & Card Games, Live Dealer Games, Bingo, Lottery, Scratchcard, Sports-betting, Virtual Sports and more. Not to mention the large amount of Land based products they develop: Cabinets (Video Lottery Terminals or VLT’s), Tablets and various cost-effective PC supported solutions to fit the needs of any Land based operator: be it Pubs, Restaurants, Bingo Venues, Arcades, Betting Shops or full blown Casinos.

That is of course not only great for their Shareholders, but also benefits their player-base, as they pretty much cover all areas with various high quality products, meaning more variety and choice. In business-terms they are steady as a rock, and will probably be around for a long time, simply because they have implemented a winning business strategy: the strength of combined force, if you will.

They offer Classic and HTML5 compatibility on almost all of their Games, and that ensures accessibility from pretty much any Mobile Device as well. Their Live Dealer section is one of the (if not the) largest Live Gaming Suppliers in both the European and Asian markets. They have also been somewhat of a pioneer in this area. Playtech offers ‘dedicated’ tables with native-speaking dealers for the Italian, Spanish, Romanian and UK markets (and more) and they also boast ‘the largest next generation Live Casino’ which opened in Riga, Latvia – in February 2017. The complex measures 8500 square metres, and hosts Live Games 24/7 for 365 days a year, which is pretty impressive.

Their software is available as a Complete Business Solution – both Instant Play and/or Download – or through Multi Platform integration, per single Game or in batches.

Playtech Games

As stated above, the range of Games is very broad, and ignoring the Land based section, we still have an impressive array of Slots and Table Games at hand: i personally wasn’t a big fan of most of Playtech’s ‘in-house’ proprietary Slots – basically everything they produced before they started buying up and assimilating – save for a few titles like Great Blue (great pay-out potential with a bit of a cult-status) and the no longer existing Marvel Jackpot Games (they have been rebranded to the ‘Age of Gods’ series, but to me don’t really feel the same) but i definitely appreciate most of their current ‘subsidiaries’ such as Ash Gaming, BGO Studios and Quickspin. For this review i focused mainly on their ‘classic’ in-house titles though.

Popular Slots

1. Great Blue
2. Gladiator
3. Everybody’s Jackpot
4. Beach Life
5. Rocky
6. Pink Panther
7. Age of Gods (Series)
8. Ace Ventura: Pet Detective
9. Archer
10. Panther moon

Additional Info

It is not all roses and sunshine though: in the past Playtech has proven quite unresponsive, and lacking, in enforcing common sense and fair policy awareness into some of their licensees, which is not only a shame overall, but in some cases has seen outrageous results for the poor players who got to experience their Progressive Jackpot Fiasco first hand, as you can read here: Playtech Progressive Jackpot Scandal

Notwithstanding the fact that Playtech is perhaps the second most represented software in the Rogue or questionable Operator ‘scene’, so to speak. There are quite a few great Casinos in our Accredited section, that offer their Games, but just make sure to steer clear of the ones that are listed in the ‘Jackpot Scandal’ link above – which are mainly Stand-alone Playtech Casinos, anyway.

Pros

• Games available in almost every Country and Jurisdiction
• Wide range of high quality Games - from in-house and subsidiary developers

Cons

• Some licensees withhold or stall Progressive Jackpot winnings,
• Often associated with Rogue Operators

Verdict

Casinomeister Rating

Casinomeister's Verdict

Playtech and I go way back. Some folks have thought that I don’t like Playtech – and years ago there was a myth circulating that I really didn’t like Playtech and the folks there. Actually, it was the opposite – I thought I had a pretty good relationship with them. We hit a speed bump in 2004 when I published an article that was very critical of their operations, and that players were not safe playing at a number of casinos. They didn’t like what I had to say and sent me a seriously worded letter from their lawyers. No worries there, I changed the text a little – giving them some wiggle room – but I stuck to my guns. Their operations in the early 2000s were pretty bad. So bad that we only included a couple of casinos in the Accredited section like Omni Casino.

But even so, in 2007 I was introduced to their new CEO Mor Weizer, who is a really nice guy. We have sat down a number of times since then and talked about what’s been going on in the industry RE: player issues.

Of course since then, Playtech has become a massive company and they consider themselves strictly a software provider with a”hands off” attitude towards their clients. The problem with that is that there have been some really bad operations – for example the old CPays group of casinos that included 32Vegas (ripped off the 32Red name – and were sued sued successfully by 32Red Plc), and the notorious Joyland casino which took about half of a player’s $4.1 million jackpot for bogus reasons. This group of casinos were purchased by William Hill in 2009.

For the past few years, they still have operators who have withdrawal limits on their progressive jackpots. And until Playtech takes the bull by the horns and insists that their operators drop this nefarious term, will I be able to increase their score at Casinomeister.

It’s interesting to note that at most i-Gaming exhibitions, Playtech usually has the largest stand – two stories, city block wide, 200 employees loitering around. But as for a player favorite, not so much. Smaller operations seem to curb more favor. Size isn’t everything y’know.

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