Dear Santa

What is Dear Santa?

A lottery player in Pennsylvania, specifically in South Park Township, may have every reason to check their recent lottery tickets, as one of them is bound to be the winner of a $3-million prize.

Bought at the 7-Eleven on Brownsville Road, the ticket for The Hunt for $3,000,000 game has already fetched the store a $10,000 bonus for selling the top prize. However, no person has stepped forward to claim the prize itself.

There have been no further details about the lottery prize. The Pennsylvania Lottery only finds out that a winning ticket has been sold after the fact, but the lottery cannot tell whether the person buying the ticket actually realized that they had won.

What is Dear Santa?

The text also bans exploiting situations of economic crisis, unemployment, debt, emotional distress, grief, anxiety, depression, loneliness, or other conditions of vulnerability to attract, retain or reactivate gamblers. 

Operators must maintain permanent mechanisms for age verification, self-exclusion, voluntary time and wagering limits, and information on the user’s own gambling behaviour. Self-exclusion must be effective with all authorised operators. 

The text also prohibits bets placed using credit cards, the use of predictive models to identify moments of greater vulnerability, and platform design mechanisms that hinder a conscious decision to stop betting, leave the service, or activate limits and blocks. Operators must maintain permanent alerts about compulsive gambling, indebtedness and asset loss, and adopt verifiable protocols for identifying risky behaviour.  

What is Dear Santa?

“I don’t think the successful studio of the future necessarily has hundreds of people,” he says. “It could be a relatively small group of extremely talented people with great ideas, strong brands and a very good understanding of players, supported by technology that does much of the heavy lifting.”

That would also shift the basis on which studios compete. If sophisticated development capabilities become accessible to a wider range of creators, scale alone becomes less of an advantage.

“It becomes less about how many developers you employ and much more about how creative you are and how well you understand the player,” Curwen says.