Another early entrant to the field on online gambling was a company called Microgaming. It was founded in 1994 and introduced its own casino application from the Isle of Man, another location that created the regulatory infrastructure for legal wagering via the Internet. But in 1996, the company sold off all of its casino operations in order to concentrate on something less risky and potentially even more lucrative: creating Internet casino technologies.
Microgaming realised early on that the ability to offer gambling online was dependent upon the development of reliable software. Under the leadership of CEO Roger Raatgever, the privately owned company set out to become one of the world’s foremost providers of gaming software.
Today, Microgaming powers more than 120 online casinos, 40 poker rooms and numerous bingo sites, with over 400 games, in some 20 languages on land-based, mobile-based and online platforms. The company also manages the world’s largest Progressive Jackpot Network. Over the past decade, it has reportedly paid out some $280 million to 7,200+ winners, creating no fewer than13 millionaires.
While Microgaming was discovering its core competency in 1995, two brothers were working on an application in the basement of their parents’ house in Toronto, Canada. It was something that would be just as important to the development of online gambling as games: a secure online financial transaction system.
Andrew and Mark Rivkin pioneered the creation of ECash, software that can securely and effectively process online monetary transactions. Their first client was InterCasino in 1996, and today their publically traded company, Cryptologic, ranks along with Microgaming among the top five application service providers in the world.
The other top providers include Boss Media, which introduced multiplayer gaming to the Internet in 1999, and PlayTech, who brought “Live Gaming” to the world in 2003, coupling live dealers with real-time video-streaming so that players can bet and chat one-on-one. The remaining top-tier software provider is Realtime Gaming (1999), whose success has derived largely from a gamble that others have been unwilling to take—betting against the United States government—as shall be seen shortly.
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