Reading Time: < 1 minute

 OpticOdds, the premier feed provider for top operators, has unveiled three innovative tools in its expanding product suite: Trading Screen, Market Intelligence, and the SGP Pricer.

The OpticOdds Trading Screen, supporting over 150 sportsbooks in real-time, processes over one million odds per second across hundreds of servers. This ensures clients receive the fastest pre-match and in-play data, crucial for making informed decisions. Features like outlier, arbitrage, injury, and consensus alerts directly impact operators’ bottom lines. The enhanced data depth allows operators to drill into specific player markets, improving their pricing accuracy in historically challenging areas.

Market Intelligence offers the first programmatic view, enabling operators to see in real-time what markets their competitors are offering that they are not. It refreshes daily and provides insights into competitors’ holds, alternate markets, uptime, and release times.

The Same Game Parlay (SGP) Pricer allows operators to query top sportsbooks to see how correlations are priced in real-time. For instance, during the Chiefs vs. 49ers 2024 Super Bowl, SGPs accounted for roughly 25% of the betting volume at major online sportsbooks. SGPs, particularly those with numerous legs, are notoriously difficult to price due to correlations. The OpticOdds SGP Pricer also algorithmically generates pre-packaged SGP recommendations.

Ryan Weinstock, Chief Commercial Officer at OpticOdds, commented: “Last year, I spent many days on the road meeting with clients. The most frequent conversation was about the lack of automated solutions in trading. More operators recognize the power of real-time data and want to leverage it. While many operators have internal solutions, these often rely on legacy providers using outdated technology. That’s why we are building real-time, low-integration trading solutions to deliver immediate value to our clients.”

Reading Time: 3 minutes

World Pool, the largest globally commingled horse racing pools created and powered by the Hong Kong Jockey Club, saw record turnover on Lockinge Stakes Day, with the fixture featuring five World Pool races for the first time, an increase from two races in 2023.

Across the five races on the card, total turnover from World Pool bet types hit HK$145.3 million (approx. £14.6 million), up from HK$66 million (approx. £6.7 million) last year.

There was a surprise result in the feature G1 Lockinge Stakes, as Audience, the runner many thought was a pacemaker for his better fancied stablemate Inspiral, never saw another rival and came home in front under rider Rab Havlin. It marked a second win at the highest level for Havlin, and a second Lockinge Stakes for John & Thady Gosden.

For the third time this season, the UK & Irish Jockeys’ Championship saw riders compete for points determined by World Pool dividends, and while Silvestre de Sousa remained top on 44.10 points, there was plenty of movement in the top five.

Audience’s win at a World Pool dividend of 21.85 was enough to catapult Rab Havlin into the top five, and meant he emerged as the leading rider on the day.

Clifford Lee notched a double, with Elite Status winning the Listed Carnarvon Stakes at a World Pool dividend of 6.95 and Lethal Levi landing the HKJC World Pool handicap at a dividend of 8.80. It was Lee’s third win of the Championship and saw him rise to fourth in the table on 27.00 points.

Oisin Murphy maintained his position in third place with a win in the G3 Aston Park Stakes aboard Middle Earth (3.65), while William Buick was also successful on the day, riding King’s Gambit (4.80) to an impressive success in the London Gold Cup Handicap.

Next up for World Pool will be a debut on Irish 1000 Guineas at the Curragh on Saturday May 26, and following that a return to the UK for a full card of races on Derby Day from Epsom on Saturday June 1, while the globally comingled pools will also be in action on the same day from Eagle Farm for Queensland Derby Day.

Upcoming World Pool events in the next three months: 

May

Sunday 26: Irish 1000 Guineas Day – Curragh Racecourse (P)

June

Saturday 1: Queensland Derby Day – Eagle Farm Racecourse (P)

Saturday 1: Derby Stakes Day – Epsom Racecourse (F)

Saturday 8: Gold Challenge – Greyville Racecourse (S)

Saturday 15: Stradbroke Handicap Day – Eagle Farm Racecourse (P)

Tuesday 18: Queen Anne Stakes Day – Ascot Racecourse (F)

Wednesday 19: Prince of Wales’s Stakes Day – Ascot Racecourse (F)

Thursday 20: Gold Cup Day – Ascot Racecourse (F)

Friday 21: Commonwealth Cup Day – Ascot Racecourse (F)

Saturday 22: Queen Elizabeth II Jubilee Stakes Day – Ascot Racecourse (F)

Sunday 30: Irish Derby Day – Curragh Racecourse (F)

July

Saturday 6: Eclipse Stakes – Sandown Racecourse (S)

Saturday 6: Durban July – Greyville Racecourse (S)

Sunday 7: Deutsches Derby Day – Hamburg Racecourse (P)

Saturday 27: King George VI & Queen Elizabeth Stakes Day – Ascot Racecourse (F)

Sunday 28: Champions Cup Day – Geryville Racecourse (P)

Sunday 28: Grosser Preis Bayerisches Zuchtrennen Day – Munich Racecourse (P)

Tuesday 30: Goodwood Cup Day – Goodwood Racecourse (F)

Wednesday 31: Sussex Stakes Day – Goodwood Racecourse (F)

   *F: Full meeting – World Pool coverage on all races in the relevant meeting
P: Part meeting – World Pool coverage only on selected races in the relevant meeting

     S: Single race – World Pool coverage only on this race in the relevant meeting

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Top-tier mobile game publishers are investing more than $21 million to build and maintain internal technology and tooling. That’s the startling headline of new research from mobile game development company, Metaplay, which also dives into the hidden, human costs of game programmers who are diverted to work on tech instead of gaming content.

Based on a survey of 125 senior executives at large mobile game development companies in the United States, the data shows that large publishers are spending an average of $21,662,784 to build and maintain their backend tech. Respondents, all of whom are C-level execs or tech team leads at companies with at least 50 staff, were asked questions relating to the size of their tech teams, how long they had been working on internal tools, and their teams’ remuneration. They said:

• $138,864 is the average salary of an employee working on internal tech at major publishers in the United States

• 52 is the average number of employees working predominantly in internal tech

• 36 months is the average number of months the companies surveyed had been building internal tech (just over three years)

Beyond the hard numbers, there are human costs associated with the in-house development of backend tech. Almost three-quarters (74%) of respondents said their game programmers had been impacted by being redeployed to work on internal tech as opposed to gaming content. Of those who had redeployed staff, 41% said that doing so had slowed the game development process, 34% said it had increased ‘crunch’ working practices, and 34% said this led to higher employee turnover.

Teemu Haila, co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Metaplay, commented:

“As a company which has spent almost four years focused entirely on building backend tech for mobile games, even we had to do a double-take when we saw these stats. Shipping a long-lasting hit game was already very challenging, but the current state of the mobile gaming market means investment at this level without any guarantee of success is incredibly risky. We’re trying to fix the binary choice of ‘build vs buy’ when it comes to backend tech – where ‘build’ means expensive and ‘buy’ means unscalable, so mobile devs can focus on making great content.”

Matt Wilson, mobile gaming advisor and investor, said:

“This research shows that building internal tech is becoming prohibitively expensive as well as distracting game-makers from their day jobs. As an investor, I generally want to see as much capital as possible to go towards developing the product. Many companies still suffer from an ‘if it’s not built here, it’s not good enough’ mentality but, while that may have been true in the past, it’s certainly not always the case now.”

Further key findings from the research:

• Top-tier game studios in the US are most likely to be developing strategy games (58%) and shooters (57%). They’re least likely to be working on hypercasual (22%) and card-collecting games (18%)

• Respondents’ companies are most likely to outsource or use third-party tooling for security and compliance (43%), multiplayer and/or matchmaking (42%), and game logic server hosting (41%). They’re least likely to outsource observability tooling (26%), and data pipelines (14%)

As well as being available as a whitepaper here, the research has today been released as a hard copy book which is available at Nordic Game Conference stand D6, or on request from Metaplay.