Hollywood Casino will be offered as a standalone app in “early” 2025, PENN Entertainment CEO Jay Snowden reiterated on Aug. 8 in PENN’s Q2 2024 earnings call. He’d made the same promise in the Q1 report.
Snowden said on Aug. 8:
By early 2025, we expect to introduce our first standalone iCasino app, which will allow us to better leverage the strength of the Hollywood brand and robust casino database.
Hollywood Casino is the name of several of PENN’s retail casinos, as well as its online product, Hollywood Casino.
However, unlike the terrestrial experience of walking straight onto a casino floor, US online casino players in Hollywood Casino’s four live states must first log in to ESPN Bet to toggle to the casino games.
PENN (Penn Entertainment 18,07 -4,09%) offers the Hollywood Casino app in the following states:
- Michigan
- New Jersey
- Pennsylvania
- West Virginia
Meanwhile, online gambling operators are stepping up their iGaming-first mindsets and products with increasingly frequent deployments of standalone apps.
- Horseshoe Online Casino is coming to Michigan next month. The brand’s parent company, Caesars Entertainment (Caesars Entertainment 36,87 -0,59%), already operates standalone iGaming app Caesars Palace Online Casino in the Wolverine State.
- In December 2023, Fanatics Casino leaders promised the online casino would eventually be available independent of the sportsbook.
- In March 2023, BetMGM announced the standalone iGaming app, Wheel of Fortune Online Casino.
On Aug. 8, Snowden noted the standalone app landscape:
2025 will be a year of delivering the balance sheet as monetization improves with ESPN Bet [and] we launch our standalone Hollywood iCasino app early in the year, which will drive improved results as we have seen from several of our competitors.
Standalone App Aims to Build on iCasino Gains
Snowden said the Hollywood Casino app wasn’t the only improvement PENN was making in its online casino game.
The Q2 2024 earnings report slides said:
We are improving our iCasino product offering through exciting new game titles from Penn Game Studios, increased breadth of third-party content, and expanded promotional capabilities
That means “promo credits” are coming to PENN’s online casino sites.
The slides displayed the following Penn Game Studios slot titles:
- Wuji Mines
- Space Bison
PENN’s slides showed a slot designed by Playtech (Playtech PLC 630,00 -1,41%) — Age of the Gods, God of Storms — as an example of the “increasing breadth of popular third-party content.”
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