Managing Editor
This week, a new online casino brand arrived in the Pennsylvania market: Imperial Treasures, which will operate on the Wind Creek Bethlehem license. It’s a new brand that doesn’t operate in any other markets, owned by Flowplay, a Wind Creek subsidiary that was hitherto dedicated to play-money social gaming.
Launching a second brand is an unusual move for a company whose primary brand only holds 1% market share in the state. Where some of Pennsylvania’s other retail casinos have opted to grant market access to third parties and reap a share of the revenue, Wind Creek has insisted on forging its own path.
The goal with Imperial Treasures appears to be to carve out a niche audience. Wind Creek Online Casino may have suffered from being too generic. Without a unique selling point, it’s hard to compete with the likes of BetMGM, DraftKings, and FanDuel. Although the product is pretty bare-bones at the moment, Imperial Treasures has an obvious focus on Asian-themed slots, which are a popular genre. Even the flagship Wind Creek site currently has a special category active for Lunar New Year slots. At Imperial Treasures, a “Winds of Asia” section is front and center.
The idea to focus on a niche interest may come from watching what larger operators are doing in neighboring New Jersey. In that crowded market, BetMGM and Bally’s have managed to capture additional slivers of the user base by launching secondary brands dedicated to Wheel of Fortune and Monopoly, respectively.
Unfortunately, none of these niche brands has a poker product, though Imperial Treasures does offer live dealer table poker.
Poarch Band has a Complex Game Plan
The launch of Imperial Treasures is the latest move in a complex and sometimes confusing game plan by Wind Creek, which is owned by the Poarch Band of Creek Indians in Alabama.
Wind Creek Hospitality operates Class II bingo-based tribal casinos in its home state. However, Alabama’s legislature has been gridlocked on gambling issues for years. The status quo of prohibition coupled with a thriving black market has endured, stymying the Poarch Band’s ambitions to expand.
Unable to do much at home, they’ve been aggressively exploring other avenues. Social gaming, through Flow Play, is one component of that. Based in Seattle, the company offers three free-to-play products (Vegas World, Casino World, and 7 Seas Casino), with more to come. Wind Creek has also experimented with using another free app, Casinoverse, to promote its retail properties.
Real-money iGaming ambitions may be the only reason Wind Creek is in Pennsylvania in the first place. The Wind Creek Bethlehem property was, until the legalization of iGaming, owned by Las Vegas Sands. However, the late Sheldon Adelson was so opposed to online casinos that he elected to sell the casino rather than either dabble in iGaming or remain retail-only in the face of omnichannel competition. The Poarch Band leapt at the opportunity to buy access to a nascent online casino market.
So far, that hasn’t paid off. Wind Creek’s all-time online casino revenue amounts to a paltry $142 million, or 1.2% of the market total. The purchase of Sands Bethlehem cost nearly ten times that, at $1.3 billion.
Undeterred, Wind Creek has continued to fish in every pond it can find. It has bought its way into the Florida gambling market with the purchase of Magic City Miami, and has gone international with casino purchases in Aruba and Curaçao.
Curaçao also happens to be one of the major regulators of international online gambling, so there may be more twists yet to come.
