A couple of months ago, one of the biggest concerns for Pennsylvanian online casino operators was the issue of skins. Fortunately, the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board (PGCB) acted quickly and made sure that the issue was sorted out – the board allowed operators to have multiple online gaming skins. However, as it turns out, while the board’s efforts to bring the issue to rest cannot be taken for granted, there were a number of unclear parts of the regulations. Fortunately, the PGCB has once again been vigilant enough to note that this is indeed a genuine concern and the board members have provided some clarity to how online casino accounts will work in Pennsylvania.
The main point of concern was that customers would only be limited to one master account per casino, even in cases where the casino had some other individually branded websites and apps or even a variety of different skins. In comparison to how the regulated online casino market in New Jersey is set up, if the mentioned concerns were true then there would be a huge disparity.
Unlike the Garden State where the one account per skin model is used, Pennsylvania chose to have customer accounts created at the operator level instead of at the skin level. According to the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board (PGCB), an interactive gaming operator is “a person licensed by the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board to operate interactive gaming or an interactive gaming system on behalf of an interactive gaming certificate holder.”
This means that the Pennsylvanian casino operators can have more than one operator that would oversee an online site under its license. To put this into perspective, let’s take Parx casino, for instance, and say it opts to use a single online operator license and it has six different skins under the license. In this case, the customers will only have one Parx account that would, in theory, be used to all of the six Parx casino skins. Alternatively, a customer would be allowed to create an account at one skin and then be restricted from creating more – unfortunately, the logistics of how this particular area will work is yet to be clarified like the rest.
The casinos are, however, not restricted to just a single online operator though. For instance, Harrah’s Philadelphia could follow suit with what Caesars, its parent company, did in New Jersey when they launched two separate online casinos from two different online operators, that is, CaesarsCasino.com and HarrahsCasino.com. In case Harrah opts for such a move and contracts with one company to run Harrah’s and another to run Caesars, then the customers will be able to create different accounts for each site.