New First Person Games for RushBet in Colombia
Six games from the First Person series by Evolution Gaming will be made available through Rush Street Interactive’s offering in Colombia, RushBet.co. This decision is made due to the extension of a deal between Evolution Gaming and Rush Street Interactive, who partnered prior to this additional influx of content. Players in Colombia can look forward to six new First Person games via tablet, mobile, and desktop options in the coming weeks and months.
Evolution Gaming’s RNG versions of its popular live casino options will soon be available in Colombia. ©Aidan Howe/Pexels
Rush Street Interactive and Evolution Gaming
At the end of June, Evolution Gaming announced that it would prolong a preexisting partnership with Rush Street Interactive, specifically in the Colombian market, to bring six new First Person games to Colombia via Rush Street’s online gambling platform, RushBet.co. Rush Street and Evolution have been partnering in various forms since 2018.
Rush Street Gaming is known for having a wide presence in the United States, but — as evidenced by this deal with Evolution Gaming — also has an international presence. In addition to IRL iterations and casino solutions, Rush Street offers its online gaming platform via Rush Street Interactive.
Evolution Gaming is also not based in Latin America: the company is headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden. The companies first partnered two years ago to create Evolution Gaming’s first live casino studio in the United States (its tenth globally), which is located in New Jersey and provides options via the domain PlaySugarHouse.com.
Rush Street’s App Keeps It Ahead During COVID
Like almost any company in the world, Rush Street and Evolution both have been impacted by the coronavirus, though Rush Street Interactive employees were likely relieved to see that the company’s online offerings managed to secure a monopoly on iGaming in Illinois, being the powers behind the only regulated and licensed gaming app in the entire state.
This is due to Betrivers, a mobile gaming app created by the Rivers Casino in Illinois with Rush Street. Before casinos in Illinois were forced to close due to the coronavirus, the Rivers Casino had gotten a license to operate the BetRivers app. Other casinos in the state had not yet gotten said licenses, and their applications are still being processed.
The First Person Games
The new games coming via Rush Street to Evolution Gaming customers in Colombia are six iterations of the First Person series. The full list of titles is Baccarat, Mega Ball, Dream Catcher, Lightning Roulette, First Person Roulette, and Blackjack. These games have already been made available in Europe and North America.
These games are known as RNG games: Random Number Generators, which pull from the aesthetic of Evolution Gaming’s other offerings of live casino games. It’s likely that this selection of games was made because live casino options — like those offered by Evolution Gaming — are not yet legal in Colombia.
The six games being offered by Evolution Gaming via Rush Street Interactive are not the full portfolio of Evolution Gaming’s First Person series. In mid-May, Evolution added three new titles, two of which are not featured in this deal. The two titles not included are First Person Dragon Tiger and First Person Football Studio.
Live Casino Options in Colombia
In fact, Evolution Gaming is wise to continue growing its base in Colombia, as sports betting operator Fecoljuegos has recently gone on the record to petition the nation’s government to regulate legal live casino options. This is because the sports betting industry in Colombia has lost, apparently, 90% of its income since the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to Rush Street and Evolution, however, the companies plan to roll out a live casino option in Colombia shortly, meaning either that the government has willingly reversed its position, created exemptions for certain companies, or that they’ll be proceeding illegally (unlikely, given they mentioned this in a public statement).
Colombia Takes Lockdown Seriously: iGaming Rules for Now
As countries around the world continue their response to the coronavirus in alternate ways, Colombia’s government has been consistently cautious since the onset of the virus, beginning with a nationwide lockdown on Thursday, March 19. Though there were brief moments of progress against the virus, the lockdown has resumed.
On June 23, Colombian President Ivan Duque announced that the nationwide lockdown — which had been briefly lifted — would resume in place until July 15, a statement which surely upset those in the country who feared nationwide economic collapse due to prolonged business closures.
According to Duque, the nationwide lockdown may alternate depending on the place. For some regions in Colombia which have experienced little or no infections of the novel coronavirus, the government will begin experimental re-opening procedures. Still, it seems that this is a long way off for Bogotá, Colombia’s capital city.
At the end of June, Bogotá Mayor Claudia Lopez announced that the city would resume lockdown due to the number of occupied beds in the city’s intensive care units. For Lopez, the larger concern has been on the precarity of the city’s health care system, as opposed to its economy, which has been the focus of President Duque.
With brick-and-mortar casinos closed, then, since March and for the foreseeable future, Colombia is likely to continue its upward trend in legal domestic iGaming continue its upward trend in legal domestic iGaming, which has been on the incline since 2019. Players will likely be happy for additional new content, so the six new games from Evolution Gaming will likely be well received.
