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January 7, 2009
The Gala Coral group have taken a bold step away from their proprietary bingo platform by launching a new online bingo website which leverages a competing vendor's software product. The new bingo site, Minxy Bingo, was launched just before Christmas 2008, although Gala Coral have yet to release a press statement announcing it.
The move has surprised many industry watchers, as Gala Coral's flagship bingo site, Gala Bingo, runs on a proprietary bingo platform. That platform's development was an area of heavy investment by Gala Coral, and was long seen as the best in the industry, with many cutting-edge features not seen at other online bingo websites.
However, times have changed since two years ago, when Gala Bingo was the biggest and most successful online bingo website in the industry. With online bingo becoming one of the fast growth sectors of the online gaming industry, Gala Coral should have witnessed a continued trend of growth.
But since then, many competing brands have sprung to the fore, among them such popular sites as Foxy Bingo, Wink Bingo and 888Ladies. Gala Coral has thus found itself increasingly under pressure to offer new games and exciting features not found in other sites.
To complicate matters further, 2008 brought the global credit crunch. Gala Coral has found itself in the position of having to service an extremely large debt, and has had to take the wise yet drastic step of closing down a number of its under performing land-based venues.
In this economic environment, it seems likely that Gala Coral is simply not keen to invest the millions of pounds required to keep their in-house software platform ahead of the trend, and is looking to outsource this aspect of their business. If this is the case, then Minxy Bingo represents a test case for Gala Coral, to see whether an online bingo site can be run as profitably when its software platform is licensed from a third party. In this case, the online bingo software is provided by a company called Virtual Fusion.
If the Minxy Bingo experiment proves to be successful, then it is quite possible that Gala Coral may elect to move their flagship online bingo website on to the Virtual Fusion platform rather than continuing to invest in maintenance development on their own product. Such a move would no doubt free up a substantial portion of their operating budget.
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