After last week’s online gambling debacle, which saw BCLC’s new online casino undergo a major malfunction, the British Columbia government will not be reopening the site. As it stands, the province’s lottery commission cannot say when the site will resume its operations as refuses to estimate when PlayNow.com will be fixed.
Before launching officially, the website underwent a $7.5 million overhaul which added new games and other innovative features. In addition to that large sum of wasted money, the estimate of losses due to website’s crash has yet to be revealed.
"It wasn’t expected to be huge revenue generator in the first couple days anyways", says Rich Coleman, Minister of Housing and Social Development. "And, frankly, it doesn’t matter what the cost is".
Elizabeth Denham, B.C. privacy commissioner, has also had a very non-chalant response to the situation. She told the Vancouver Times Colonist that she has been pleased so far with the response to the webite’s crash, despite compromising the personal information of more than 100 users.
Perhaps the non-chalant attitude was what got the BCLC into such hot water in the first place. The province assured itself and its residents that it had enough experience to run an online gambling website on its own, without taking enough precaution to prevent an error of this severity from taking place.
Now, British Columbia must repair the situation, but with relaxed attitudes about the entire situation, it may be quite some time before PlayNow.com is back on the market.
