Australia
NBA 2K LEAGUE AND AUSTRALIA’S NATIONAL BASKETBALL LEAGUE ANNOUNCE LANDMARK AGREEMENT TO LAUNCH EXPANSION TEAM, NBL OZ GAMING
NBL Becomes First Australian Professional Team to Join a Global Esports League, Third NBA 2K League Team from Outside of North America
The NBA 2K League and Australia’s National Basketball League (NBL) announced a landmark agreement that will see the NBL launch an NBA 2K League expansion team, NBL Oz Gaming, representing Australia. This marks the first time an Australian professional team has joined a global esports league on a permanent basis.
The NBA 2K League tipped off its inaugural season in May 2018, with 17 teams, each affiliated with an NBA team. With the addition of NBL Oz Gaming, the NBA 2K League has now expanded to 25 teams, 22 of which are affiliated with NBA teams, including 2022 Champions Pistons GT (3v3) and Bucks Gaming (5v5). NBL Oz Gaming becomes the third expansion team from outside of North America following the addition of the Gen.G Tigers representing Shanghai, and DUX Infinitos representing Mexico City, in 2021 and 2022, respectively, and will make its debut when the NBA 2K League’s sixth season tips off in spring 2023. Together, the NBL and the NBA 2K League will collaborate to grow the NBA 2K League’s presence in Australia through talent identification, joint marketing efforts and grassroots events. NBL Oz Gaming will be based in the U.S. during the 2023 season, with the team’s location still to be announced.
“This is another historic day as we welcome Australia’s premier basketball league to the NBA 2K League family,” said NBA 2K League President Brendan Donohue. “The NBL has a demonstrated track record of not only transforming their league, but also growing a fanbase in new and creative ways. The NBL is the ideal partner to help the NBA 2K League do the same in Australia, where basketball and 2K are incredibly popular and we’re thrilled that NBL Oz Gaming will represent Australia in the NBA 2K League for years to come.”
“We have been intrigued by the esports sector now for some time, largely because there is a significant crossover between gaming fans and basketball fans – more so than any other sport,” NBL Commissioner Jeremy Loeliger said. “We always want to partner with the best, and one of the best professional esports leagues in the world is operated by our long-standing friends and partners at the NBA. The global popularity of NBA 2K and the NBA 2K League continue to grow every year, and neither is showing any signs of slowing down. Our hopes and expectations are that NBL Oz Gaming will introduce the NBL to a legion of new fans around the world. But first, we have to turn our attention to building a strong and competitive roster and showing once again that the NBL can take on the best in the world. This time, it just happens to be a slightly different game!”
The 2023 NBA 2K League season will livestream in Australia on Twitch and YouTube. Over the NBA 2K League’s first five seasons, the league has conducted international qualifying events in Hong Kong, Seoul, and remotely for top players from the Asia-Pacific region. Jack “Jaacko” Stevenson (New Zealand) was selected 50th overall in the 2019 NBA 2K League Draft and Meason “xMiLo—” Camille (Australia) was selected 62nd overall in the 2021 NBA 2K League Draft.
NBA 2K22 was in the Top-3 best-selling console games in Australia (#3) and New Zealand (#2) in 2021*.
The NBL has established itself as Australia’s fastest growing sports league and one of top basketball leagues in the world outside of the NBA. Over the past few seasons, the league has seen record attendance, broadcast audiences and social media engagement, and has become a destination for top players from around the world, most notably through the NBL Next Stars program. Through the growth of the NBL, the success of Australia’s national teams and the impact that Australian players are having in top basketball leagues around the world, basketball is now the fastest-growing sport in Australia.
NBL Oz Gaming will participate in the NBA 2K League Expansion Draft on Saturday, Nov. 5 (Eastern Time).
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Australia
Feedback Sought on How Public Lotteries are Run in NSW
Liquor & Gaming NSW is seeking feedback from industry, stakeholders and the community on how public lotteries are run in NSW.
The Public Lotteries Regulation 2016 is due to expire on 1 September 2026 and Liquor & Gaming NSW intends to renew the regulation to support the legislative framework for lottery regulation, while ensuring it remains fit for purpose.
Public consultation is a key part of the process and the draft Public Lotteries Regulation 2026 and Regulatory Impact Statement will be open for consultation until Friday 10 July.
It is proposed that the regulation will retain most of the existing provisions with some minor amendments to modernise the regulatory framework, remove outdated provisions and improve clarity, consistency and effectiveness.
Before the draft regulation can be remade, legislation requires a formal process of review be undertaken, which includes consultation with the public, interest groups and industry or businesses likely to be affected by the draft regulation.
It’s important for public lotteries to be conducted properly and in line with community interests and expectations, with appropriate harm minimisation measures.
The regulation supports the legislation by setting the standards around the conduct of public lotteries and puts in place consumer protections for people who buy lottery tickets.
The post Feedback Sought on How Public Lotteries are Run in NSW appeared first on EE Gaming | Global iGaming & Tech Intelligence Hub.
Australia
Former Star Entertainment Executives Mathias Bekier and Paula Martin Disqualified and Ordered to Pay Penalties
The Australian Federal Court has disqualified former Star Entertainment Group Limited executives Mathias Bekier and Paula Martin from managing corporations for six and seven years respectively and ordered them to pay pecuniary penalties for breaching their duties by failing to properly manage serious risks at one of Australia’s major casinos.
The Court ordered:
Mr Bekier, the former Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, to pay a pecuniary penalty of $700,000 and disqualified him from managing corporations for six years.
Ms Martin, the former General Counsel, Company Secretary, and Chief Legal and Risk Officer, to pay a pecuniary penalty of $400,000 and disqualified her from managing corporations for seven years.
His Honour also ordered that Mr Bekier and Ms Martin pay 45% of ASIC’s costs of the proceeding.
The Court previously found that both Mr Bekier and Ms Martin breached their duties owed to Star Entertainment in relation to their handling of the risks associated with money laundering and criminal activity.
ASIC Chair Sarah Court said: “senior executives have a critical responsibility to identify, escalate and properly manage serious risks within their organisations.
“These failures occurred in a highly regulated environment and contributed to significant governance breakdowns at Star.
“Penalties of this scale reflect the seriousness of their conduct and send a strong message to other senior executives of listed companies that failures of this type are unacceptable.”
ASIC has an enduring enforcement priority focused on governance and directors’ duties failures.
In relation to Mr Bekier, His Honour Justice Lee said:
“Senior executives of casino operators, and public companies conducting enterprises pregnant with risks more broadly, must understand that failures of the kind established by the contraventions may attract substantial personal consequences.”
Further, in respect of Ms Martin he found that “the community is entitled to expect that a solicitor occupying such positions and having such responsibilities, within one of Australia’s largest casino operators, will display professional independence, accuracy and judgment of a high order. The conduct established … represented a very serious departure from those standards” and that
“Ms Martin knew of a miscellany of alarming information pertaining to [an overseas gambling junket] … She was required to report such matters to the Board but failed to do so. This is all the more concerning when considered against the backdrop of Ms Martin being the most senior solicitor employed by Star”; and that
“The more pervasive the failures of governance and culture become, the greater the obligation upon those entrusted with legal and risk responsibilities to insist upon compliance with legal obligations and proper standards of corporate conduct.”
The post Former Star Entertainment Executives Mathias Bekier and Paula Martin Disqualified and Ordered to Pay Penalties appeared first on EE Gaming | Global iGaming & Tech Intelligence Hub.
Anthony Woods
PointsBet Goes All In on Grafana Cloud to Power AI-Driven Observability at Scale
Grafana Labs, the company behind the open observability cloud, announced that PointsBet, one of Australia’s fastest-growing digital wagering operators, has selected Grafana Cloud as its unified observability platform. PointsBet is using Grafana Cloud to consolidate telemetry across its proprietary betting platform, accelerate incident resolution with AI-powered insights and give engineering teams the visibility they need to own and operate their services with confidence.
“Our platform is our product. Grafana Cloud gives us one place to see everything — and the AI tools to act on it fast,” Daniel Lucas, CTO at PointsBet.
Grafana Cloud was selected for its ability to deliver:
• Unified Observability Across Every Data Source: PointsBet’s proprietary platform spans real-time odds calculation, player account management, front-end apps and a custom-built betting engine, all generating high-volume telemetry from multiple sources. With Grafana Cloud, PointsBet can ingest and correlate metrics, logs, traces and profiles in a single open platform, ending the fragmentation that slows incident response. Built on OpenTelemetry and open source foundations including Grafana Loki, Grafana Tempo and Prometheus, there’s no vendor lock-in — just a unified view of the stack. This flexibility is what enables PointsBet’s shift towards a true service ownership model: engineering teams can now observe, understand and act on what they build.
• AI That’s Actually Useful: Grafana Assistant gives PointsBet engineers a context-aware AI co-pilot for investigation and troubleshooting, letting them query telemetry in natural language, navigate dashboards and trace issues to root cause without deep expertise in PromQL, LogQL or TraceQL. Now generally available in Grafana Cloud, Grafana Assistant can run multi-step incident investigations, generate and refine queries on the fly, and surface the right data at the right moment — keeping every action inside the tools teams already use. For a business where live betting windows close in seconds, reducing time-to-resolution isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s a competitive edge.
• Application Observability That Empowers Developers: Grafana Cloud Application Observability provides PointsBet’s teams with end-to-end visibility into how their services perform — surfacing service dependency maps, latency hotspots and the customer impact of every change. By connecting distributed traces, metrics and logs in a unified view, Application Observability helps teams understand not just that something broke, but why and who is affected.
“Observability used to mean drowning in dashboards, alert noise and waiting for someone else to tell you what’s on fire. We chose Grafana Cloud because it brings technology and commercial teams together on the single view building autonomous value streams — and Grafana Assistant means our engineers spend less time asking ‘what’s wrong’ and more time fixing it. It enables the shift from reactive firefighting to teams that genuinely own their services end to end and that helps us build a platform our customers can reliably bet on,” said Saurabh Vyas, Head of SRE, PointsBet.
“Real-time platforms at scale are some of the hardest systems to operate — every component has to perform under pressure, and every signal matters when something goes wrong. PointsBet’s engineering team has built a sophisticated platform, and we’re proud to give their engineers the observability foundation they need to operate it. Open, AI-powered, and built to cut through complexity — that’s exactly what Grafana Cloud is for,” said Anthony Woods, co-founder of Grafana Labs.
The post PointsBet Goes All In on Grafana Cloud to Power AI-Driven Observability at Scale appeared first on EE Gaming | Global iGaming & Tech Intelligence Hub.
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