On September 24, Malta officially announced: virtual sports supplier GoldenRace has signed a strategic partnership with international platform Novibet, with its virtual sports catalog fully integrated into the latter's platform. The first batch of markets listed four: Greece, Brazil, Mexico, and Ireland — all licensed markets. Fotini Matthaiou, Novibet's Director of Product and CRM, put it plainly: this fills in a piece of content for the global product portfolio. Commercial terms were not disclosed, nor was the launch timeline for each market.
The core of the catalog is virtual football. According to GoldenRace: this is the most-played virtual football product in the industry, with 4K quality, motion-capture production, both league and cup formats, and complete World Cup and European Cup versions. On the periphery there are also horse racing, greyhound racing, motorbike racing, and 3x3 basketball. The scale is more intuitive: this supplier's products generate over 25 million settlements per day across the entire network. Horse racing was singled out — markets like Greece and Brazil have high interest in horse racing, which fits perfectly. This month it hasn't been idle either; on September 2 it just signed with Bwinners for the African market.
The real selling point of virtual sports is filling the gaps. Real events have schedules — the early hours and off-seasons are the gaps; virtual content starts anytime, regardless of time window. When teams doing white-label turnkey platforms select content, virtual sports deserves its own dedicated section: which aggregator the catalog comes from, whether game API integration is a one-time full connection or one-by-one, and what requirements 4K assets place on bandwidth and low-end devices. Markets like Brazil and Mexico have already given demand signals. Having this section fully configured in advance in sports turnkey platform solutions is far less hassle than adding it after launch. GoldenRace founder Martin Wachter's words are also on the table: the goal is to provide platform operators with profitable virtual sports content.