Crown Resorts ushers in responsible play with PlaySafe

Crown Resorts is one of the companies that bore the brunt of the wide reforms passed across Australia and individual states in the country that had to do with making the gambling industry more transparent, accountable, and committed to its consumers.

The company is no longer reactive in dictating the discourse on safer play in casinos, however, as the operator announced that it has now introduced Crown PlaySafe, a program designed to help reduce and eliminate harmful gambling rates, and a new cog in Crown’s broader machinery under the company’s Future Crown program to tackle gambling harm.

PlaySafe is designed to identify, help, and support consumers who are experiencing gambling harm, but the solution goes further as it wants to ensure that it acts preventively, too. Crown has already committed $13m to tackle gambling harm in the form of prevention and support initiatives and the team responsible for PlaySafe has actually doubled in the past year.

The operator wants to go much further, calling itself a potential world leader in the prevention of gambling-related harm. Crown Resorts CEO Ciarán Carruthers said that the company is in a strong position to maximize player safety and scale up all efforts to educate and support guests who come to the operator’s casino floors to enjoy gaming in a safe and positive way.

"With a focus on collaboration and engagement with government, industry and community-based partners, I am confident that together we can reduce gambling harm and create a safer gambling future for all Australians," Carruthers added.

Australia, one of theworld’s most prolific gambling nations, is a good place to try and achieve record harm-minimization levels as the country loves to gamble. However, Crown Resorts is using empirical evidence and research to ensure that it provides consumers with a safe and secure gambling environment and works on building relevant approaches that effectively prevent gambling harm.

Crown PlaySafe is developed by a dedicated gambling research and policy team, which is headed by Dr Jamie Wiebe, and has been in the works since March 2022. Its implementation today is an indicator of how far the team has made it.

A big focus of the program was to continue destigmatizing gambling harm and embolden individuals who need help to actually be comfortable reaching out to the relevant resources and organizations.

Wiebe said that knowledge of how problem gambling begins has enabled the PlaySafe program to work on introducing measures that are effective and work. Crown has a new online self-exclusion portal that allows guests to impose self-limits, exclude themselves from gambling, and opt out of marketing, among others.

Crown is also going to soon be a part of the YourPlay program in Victoria, which is another measure designed to help control, monitor, and intervene in cases where individuals are showing problem gambling symptoms.

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