Seizing Opportunities In Live Dealer Games

Words by Rachel Zammit Cutajar

Adjusting to the market changes brought on by the coronavirus pandemic has been a challenge for everyone. Nonetheless, the iGaming industry has weathered this crisis better than most. With a small and flexible team, OneTouch was able to seize on certain opportunities, rendering them the first providers of live casino games specifically made for mobile devices.

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Madis Raus, Ragnar Toompere, Petra Maria Poola, Maxim Dorofeev, Olli Castleman

A typical working week of 40 hours means you spend more time with your colleagues than with your family. While you cannot choose your family members, you can certainly choose the team you end up working with. With only 41% of people reportedly being happy at work, and companies with satisfied employees outperforming the competition by 20%, the art of happiness at the workplace is big business. At OneTouch, the senior team consisting of Ragnar Toompere, Managing Director, Ollie Castleman, Head of Integration, Maxim Dorofeev, CTO, Madis Raus, Head of Product and Petra Maria Poola, Head of Business Development, consider themselves to be more like a family, and have attributed some of their success to these close relationships.

As I’m introduced to the team, we begin to talk about roles within the company, and almost everyone in the team struggles to attach a job title to themselves. “We’ve always had a very fluid team and we don’t give much importance to labels, so while we each have very specialised responsibilities, we don’t really tend to stick to a pre-determined job title,” Ollie said.

The Coronavirus pandemic has affected the way we live and work. However, for the OneTouch team, the most upsetting part of the lockdowns was missing out on Doughnut Fridays. “We were already quite a fragmented team with people in Malta, Tallinn, Spain and Manila, so we were already quite used to working remotely – around 50% of our set up was remote before Covid hit,” Maxim said. He admits to being the one who misses Doughnut Fridays the most! “And as part of the core team, we still came into the office quite a lot. Most of the team has young children, so coming into the office was an escape and essential for our mental health!” Ollie added.

As cliché as it may sound, the team at OneTouch are much like a family, and use their office in Tallinn as a place to connect with each other. Games are very much at the forefront of their way of doing business with a central pool table at the office being the source for much affectionate banter, and Madis bearing the brunt of the pool-related jokes. While enjoying the odd trip to the casino as a group, they’re in it for the social aspect, rather than gambling itself, as is the case with a number of people who work in the industry. “We do play some online games, but that’s more to stay on top of what’s going on in the industry. Like most people who work in the iGaming industry, we tend to stay away from online games when it comes to having fun. Too much of a good thing, I guess!” Ollie quipped.

“Founded in 2016, we are still quite a small firm with approximately 50 employees, so we had an advantage over the larger firms that tended towards larger, micromanaged teams. We’ve always trusted our team members to get the job done, but we don’t need to know what they’re doing at every moment of every day. This helped us focus our energy on the changing markets that coronavirus created and to be able to seize opportunities that arose,” Ragnar said.

With average screen times rising to over 13 hours a day during the pandemic, the business of online gambling picked up where most other industries experienced a slump, if not a total crash, as had happened with travel and hospitality. At OneTouch, B2B game development takes place in a mobile-forward fashion. With people picking their phone up at an average of 58 times per day, the industry of mobile games has skyrocketed. Ragnar explained that while many online gaming companies simply transferred their existing portfolio of games onto mobile devices, this often resulted in a squashed look that is not as functional as one would desire. “We create games that are primarily for mobile devices, so functionality on a mobile device is paramount. Our games are all in portrait-mode, which offers a more comfortable user experience.

You need to be able to play the entire game with just one thumb, and we’ve focused on both a left-thumbed and right-thumbed configuration,” Madis said.

The end of last year saw the release of the first live casino games which were produced specifically for mobiles. They are operating 25 tables in collaboration with Bombay Club in Tallinn, with games such as Baccarat, Blackjack and roulette, and 35 more tables to be opened at a studio in Kiev in the coming October. “The effect of the pandemic brought about the end of a lot of companies in the gaming industry, particularly brick-and-mortar casinos. The agility of the company allowed us to divert resources towards mobilefriendly alternatives, and in June or July of last year, we decided to go for a live-dealer option for mobile devices. In just six months we had developed a first for the industry, and are set on expanding this niche with more tables in Kiev,” Ragnar explained.

Though Covid has presented opportunities to OneTouch, there have also been difficulties. Integrating new team members and developing new business leads have perhaps been the most challenging aspects, and Petra in particular is looking forward to getting back out there to meet new people and take the company forward. “Although I have lots of contacts from my time at SiGMA, things have been very different since Covid hit. Business and pleasure have always been a little bit blurred in this industry, and we’ve lost the

casual interactions that very often turn into business opportunities. Whether it’s hanging out at Valletta’s members’ clubs, SOHO’s Friday beers or any other networking event, I really miss meeting the decision makers of the iGaming companies and creating new business opportunities,” Petra said.

“We’ve had to change our approach in so far as business development goes. We’ve put a lot of effort into marketing and have seen varying results from different avenues. While banners and adverts don’t really cut it, we’ve had great response from the podcasts we’ve done with iGaming NEXT. A banner is never going to replicate human interaction, however, when people observe other people’s conversations, there is some of that human connection that we’ve so missed. In our last podcast, we got a lot of engagement because of Madis’ haircut, or lack of it, rather… I feel like it’s really important to get that human interaction back into business, and here’s to hoping covid restrictions are on the way out.. for good, this time!” Petra said.

At just five years old, this company has shown agility and ability to create opportunities from adverse climates brought about by the pandemic. We can expect exciting things from this young company, all at the touch of a button.

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