Given that Fanatics Inc. earned its multibillion-dollar valuation as primarily a sports apparel company, it’s natural to assume that the Fanatics Betting & Gaming division will prioritize its sportsbook product over its casino product.

But Chief Product Officer Scot McClintic says that’s not a safe assumption.

“Although the heritage of Fanatics is very much sports-driven, we take casino very seriously,” McClintic told US Bets last week during an exclusive casino app product demonstration.

McClintic previously worked for Penn National Gaming (now PENN Entertainment), a longtime casino company, and he is joined on the Fanatics strategy team by other folks with casino industry experience.

“We don’t think about [casino] as an afterthought,” he said. “It’s not like, ‘We’re gung-ho on sports, and then we’ll tack on casino later.’ We want to do it right, from the ground up.”

Last month, Fanatics Casino launched in West Virginia, and that’s the only state it’s available in for now. But that won’t be the case for long.

Fanatics tells US Bets that the Pennsylvania online casino space will be the next one the product enters — most likely sometime in January — with Michigan and New Jersey also on deck for early 2024.

A beta test, of sorts

When Fanatics launched its sports betting product in its first few states, the operator conducted extensive beta testing over the course of about six months with select customers before eventually reaching full statewide availability.

With the casino product, the beta testing has taken a different shape. Essentially, West Virginia, a state with a population slightly under 1.8 million, is hosting the trial-and-error period while games slowly roll out and functionality is enhanced, and Fanatics Casino will have effectively been beta-tested by the time it debuts in those other three states that each have populations between 9 million and 13 million.

“This is Version One,” McClintic said of the app in its December form. “We have a casino-specific engineering team, product team, and design team that are just waking up every morning thinking, breathing casino.”

The iCasino is nested within the sportsbook app for now — a “unified experience,” as Fanatics describes it — but a standalone casino product is part of the future plan.

The home page learns and personalizes, so a frequent casino player will see calls to action for those games and that part of the app, while a pure sports bettor will be less likely to see those same graphics on their curated feed.

Once on the casino side, the lobby features icons at the top for the various types of games, thumbnails for popular games just below, and in the upper-right corner, both a player’s wallet balance and “FanCash” balance.

FanCash is a major point of emphasis for the operator in both sportsbook and casino, effectively rewarding points that can be used to purchase bonus bets and merchandise. In the first quarter of 2024, this will expand to include casino site credit, free spins, and other casino bonuses.

Fanatics anticipates that FanCash will be part of the casino product in Pennsylvania at launch time.

What’s there, what’s coming

The featured game in the graphic above is Fanatics Blackjack, an original product built by the in-house Fanatics Game Studios in partnership with Boom Entertainment.

In the first four weeks or so in West Virginia, Fanatics Blackjack has been “our top performing game, by far,” said McClintic. He estimated it represents about 60% of all Fanatics Casino activity in the state in these early days.

Like everything else on the app, Fanatics Blackjack functions smoothly and has a clean aesthetic. It’s a single-hand game for now (as compared to other versions of mobile blackjack that allow three bets at once), with varying speed options.

One intriguing feature — although it will likely prove polarizing — is in-game depositing. Anyone who’s played much blackjack in a casino has seen the scenario play out where someone is risking their last chip and gets dealt a hand that basic strategy says warrants either a double-down or a split, and in order to make that play, the gambler needs to pull cash out of their wallet. That’s what in-game depositing enables, the ability to re-load mid-hand if the last of your online bankroll is already invested and it would be incorrect to, say, have to play your pair of aces as a 12.

From a responsible gambling perspective, however, in-game depositing could set off some alarm bells, so Fanatics will want to tread carefully with promoting the option.

Another point of emphasis for Fanatics is search functionality. That’s been the case with Fanatics Sportsbook, where, as McClintic demonstrated, you can type “CMC” into the search bar and the app will know you mean Christian McCaffrey and show you all of his props. A similar approach applies to the casino side, where you can type in “fortune” and see assorted slots games that have that word in their title or bear similarities to such games.

Some parts of the app are a work in progress, McClintic freely admits. The company is still rolling out games, with three more originals from Fanatics Game Studios coming in 2024 Q1.

Live dealer games are not available in West Virginia because Fanatics does not intend to build a studio for those games within the state as would be required, but live dealer will be coming to Pennsylvania, Michigan, and New Jersey.

Another “key deficiency” McClintic cites concerns bonusing. “We’re going to be heavily focused,” he said, “on creating more and more interesting loyalty and bonus mechanisms to keep casino customers excited and engaged.”

But for now, McClintic’s focus has been on launching, one state at a time, and making sure “we’ve got the core casino product stable, which it has been in West Virginia.”

He then added, “We wanted to launch a casino product that we’re really proud of — one that, if we were to launch a standalone casino app, we felt confident that this product, even in a V1, would be able to compete with all the others out there. I would say we’re pretty close to that already.”

Photo courtesy of Fanatics Inc.