EUROPEAN STATE LOTTERIES AND TOTO ASSOCIATION

4
A world of creativity
with scratch-off tickets
Scratch-off games are fast-action
products that reward players with instant
win. Although instant lotteries are not
very old, going back only to the seventies
and eighties – Switzerland’s “Loterie
de la Suisse Romande” being the very
first organization in Europe to launch
a scratch-off game, this product has
slowly gained a dynamic position in any
Lottery’s offerings. As the instant game’s
popularity increased across Europe, the
need for more creative designs, exciting
play themes, larger prizes and payouts
became apparent. In some countries,
the presentation of instant games as part
of TV shows resulted in huge success,
as the example of “Le Millionnaire” in
France can attest. Nevertheless, such a
phenomenon did not necessarily repeat
in other European countries, and by
the 1990s, certain instant lotteries even
experienced an important drop.
Therefore, Lottery organizations decided
to rethink their instant game approach
and since then, scratch-off tickets have
occupied an important share of the
European lottery market. To insure
regular success, Lotteries have evaluated
and implemented a slew of variants for
their instant games – some on a regular
basis, others on occasion: Adding more
play areas on scratch-off tickets, allowing
a larger variety of prizes from important
jackpots to a multitude of low-tier prizes
and as a more recent introduction, higherprice
point for these tickets.
We have asked some of our members
to give us a general idea of the instant
market in their country, emphasizing
the differences between low-price point
tickets versus higher-price tickets.
The Austrian Lotteries launched their
first instant game in 1995 and since then,
they have been providing their players
with 12 to 13 different scratch-off tickets
in the price range of €1.50 to €5.00. In 2000
and 2001, the Lotteries experimented
with higher priced tickets of €7.00 and
€6.50 and €7.50 in subsequent years until
2006. This was only a partial success with
the consumers, so the Austrian Lotteries
did not repeat this price point.
In Croatia, the first instant game was
launched in 1987 and the scratch-off
offering remains at a low-price point.
P AN RAMA
Instant Lotteries
The increase of the price of the instant
ticket is done slowly because the Lottery
does not think the Croatian market has a
demand yet for high price tickets.
The Baden-Württemberg Lottery in
Germany does not offer scratch-off games
at a high-price point at the moment. The
highest ticket cost is e2.00 which is very
successful, along with their other instant
games priced at e1.00. In 1999 and 2000,
the highest price ever set for scratched
tickets was DM 5.
In the next few pages, we are presenting
the very interesting comments of
some Lotteries on instant games, play
formula and payout structures and
price points: La Française des Jeux/
France and Lottomatica/Italy talk about
experiences with high-price tickets up
to e10; Veikkaus/Finland has presented
some years much higher priced scratchoff;
Szerencsejáték Zrt /Hungary and
the Loterija Slovenije / Slovenia prefer
to tailor their instant games to their
market’s preferences rather than ticket
price, while Swisslos/Switzerland has had
a long standing with high-price lottery
games. All these presentations are full
of practical evaluations and could be
excellent references on the diversity of
scratch-off games.