On April 4, the Pennsylvania Gaming Control board officially announced that it would permit online gambling businesses in the state to host multiple ‘skins.’ This move will effectively allow companies that do not have licenses to operate in Pennsylvania to get in on the intrastate online gambling market. As for the state’s online gambling license holders, the temporary regulations will allow them “to deploy interactive gaming skins or interactive gaming websites to facilitate the conduct of interact gaming activities.”
The Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board (PGCB) on Wednesday, April 3 published the latest instalment of the rules and regulations in preparation for interactive gaming certificate applications that they will begin accepting sometime this month.
However, Kevin O’Toole, the Executive Director of the PGCB summed everything up in a recent press release.
“What the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board did at its public meeting of April 4, 2018, was to approve temporary regulations that enable a very open and competitive market for internet gaming while at the same time assuring transparency and accountability for the consumers. Under these temporary regulations there is no limitation on the number of skins that a slot machine licensee may employ to deliver games, but every ‘skin’ that a casino offers must be branded in a manner that makes it clear that it is offered on behalf of the slot machine licensee consistent with language of the act,” he said.
There Is a Catch
While the rules and regulations have definitely addressed the contentious question of ‘skins’, lobbying on the issue has been rather fierce in the state with some operators supporting the move and some others opposing it. Still, the PGCB saw it best not to throw away the opportunity that been presented here in the form of the online gambling market. As such, interactive gaming certificate holders will be allowed to partner with multiple third-party licensed interactive gaming operators.
However, one of the caveats is that the third-party operators cannot offer any form of online gambling to the Pennsylvanian online gambling market on their own. In fact, the third-party operators must have the certificate holder’s webpage or webpage of an entity within the certificate holder’s organizational structure. This means that the third-party operators will have to piggyback on the domain names of the interactive gaming certificate holders they are affiliated with.
Even players will have to adhere to a couple of terms – one of them being the restriction on how many accounts every player can have.
“A player shall have only one interactive gaming account for each interactive gaming certificate holder or interactive gaming operator licensee. Each interactive gaming account shall be non-transferable; unique to the player who establishes the account, and distinct from any other account number that the player may have established with the interactive gaming certificate holder or interactive gaming operator licensee for non-interactive gaming activity,” the clause reads.
