Hills pulls 100-plus casino games due to reality check struggles

William Hill has taken 109 casino games offline until they comply with new ‘reality check’ regulations introduced by Great Britain’s Gambling Commission, EGR has learned.

As of 30 April, operators were required to give customers the chance to set a ‘reality check’ – a warning which pops up at certain intervals throughout their game session.

However William Hill has voluntarily removed 109 third-party supplied games from its site because they did not have the required functionality in-place. Prior to pulling the games, Hills had emailed customers to notify them of the games which did not have the reality check feature installed.

“It’s a third-party issue,” William Hill spokesperson Rupert Adams told EGR. “The suppliers haven’t managed to comply in the time we would have liked them to, but they’re working on it.

“Everyone’s been very transparent with the Gambling Commission and we expect the games to be back online with the correct checks in the coming weeks,” he added.

Adams said the loss of the games had not had a significant impact on turnover, with most recreational punters migrating to different games and added that there was no specific timeline for the games to be back online because there was “more than one” third-party supplier involved.

“It’s an industry-wide thing rather than just us,” he added. “The reality is I’d be very surprised if any of the big companies didn’t have at least one provider that hadn’t got this done.”

EGR reached out to a number of major UK-facing operators, with Ladbrokes saying they were “fully compliant” with the new rules, and a spokesman for Sky Bet saying the company had built its own solution for reality check functionality, taking the issue out of provider’s hands, and as a result had not had any problems.

However, Unibet did take a number of games off the shelves, games which were in the main related to older titles of which suppliers had no interest in updating with the new feature.

The Hills’ withdrawal comes after the regulator had reportedly received complaints from compliant companies about the apparent lack of repercussions for latecomers.

Several industry insiders had previously questioned whether operators and suppliers would be ready for the regulations on the 30 April deadline.

The head of casino at a leading European operator questioned whether suppliers and operators had given themselves sufficient time to get the necessary technical work completed.

“It’s been left for so long from all sides that the deadline created a lot of panic – there’s a lot of operators and providers who aren’t ready,” the casino head told EGR.

“No one looked into the documentation and realised how complex this project was going to be and by the time we realised, it was too late for the industry to work together on this and everyone ended up with a massive piece of work.”

The Gambling Commission, which is said to have been understanding on the issue and granted extensions without a specific deadline, refused to comment specifically on the William Hill case.