Light & Wonder Exit Live Casino

Light & Wonder to Cease Live Casino

In an announcement made following the publication of Light & Wonders’ year-end results, CEO Matt Wilson said the company would be closing its Live Casino operation and divesting its business assets.

CEO Matt Wilson said,

“While we’re still in the relatively early days of investing in the business, we strive to stay nimble as an organization and are thus focusing on the risk-reward profile of our other businesses, which have better visibility to superior returns relative to live casino.

After a thorough strategic review, we identified that there have been some changes to the operator and supplier dynamics in that category, which has resulted in some degradation in pricing. So we made the decision to divest that set of assets and refocus the business to higher ROI investments.

I think it’s an example that these strategies aren’t set-and-forget, we review them periodically and make sure they’re working for us.

We made the decision to divest and focus on areas where we can see clear line of sight to better returns.”

Light & Wonder entered the live casino space by purchasing Authentic Gaming in 2023. Since then they invested in creating a new range of studio games to complement the live land-based streamed solution, which is popular in the UK and across Europe.

They then took the bold step of building a state-of-the-art studio in Michigan, US, to enter the licensed US market, which is currently dominated by Evolution and Playtech.

These assets and intellectual property will have value and provide a ready-made solution to an existing live casino provider that doesn’t have the land-based Streamed solution or studios in the US. It’s an interesting proposition for someone.

Authentic gaming has changed hands several times in the past years. First, it became part of the Leo Vegas Group before being sold to Genting, which later sold it to Light & Wonder.