Roundtable

STAYING IN THE KNOW

A panel of experts gather to analyse the ever-changing climate in gaming and how to adapt to maximise opportunities and potential

THE PANEL

Stanislav Silin CEO, Altenar

Magnus Olsson

Head of sales and account management, Play’n GO

Erik Köhler

Marketing manager, Betsoft Gaming

Richard Hogg

CCO, BetGames.TV

What is the state of innovation for suppliers in terms of offering gaming operators engaging content? Stanislav Silin: The very term “engaging content” already points to UX. And that is certainly one area of innovation that suppliers, including Altenar, have been putting efforts towards. Another way to engage would be to extract pieces of supplier content, and package them in a way for the operator to make such content available to their players in new or unexpected ways. We did something similar with in-banner betting together with Trustly and some operators earlier this year, and this is an idea we’re looking to expand on.

Magnus Olsson: For us, innovation comes in many forms and is a constant moving target rather than something that can be reached. When most people think of innovation, they think of new, game-changing ideas that no one has ever seen before, but it can also be a new way of doing something old or bringing something new to a familiar topic.

We are driving innovation on many levels simultaneously; the common

denominator is the ambition to enhance player experience. The extensive scope of our portfolio enables us to address a multitude of needs and aspects of player experience through various innovations.

Of course, the search for innovation cannot compromise the standard of our products. As we aim to make the most innovative games we can, we also strive to make sure that these are products our operators can trust, and our players can play knowing they are secure. Sometimes, in the quest to create something new, you can overlook the basics; we strive to create innovative gameplay without compromising on the security of our partners in regards to bonus abuse or other factors.

Innovation for Play’n GO is evolving through our entire roadmap of games. We aim to cater to those that enjoy the gameplay, whether they are new to this type of digital entertainment or slot game aficionados. This also means we have different expectations for different games. Some are specialised, in a way, and aimed at a particular type of entertainment, while other games have a wider audience and are more volatile in the number of active players and rounds.

Richard Hogg: Innovation right now needs to be all about taking the lessons learned from the last few months and putting it into building a pandemic-proof portfolio. We’re not out of the woods yet when it comes to COVID-19, and while sports betting may be returning, I expect players’ approach to gaming to continue in the same trend that we’ve seen recently.

Players right now want content that offers extended entertainment. Suppliers needs to be offering gaming content that offers a lower spend with far more regular play without emptying wallets in a matter of hours. Games orientated towards betting on live outcomes, such as the live dealer proposition, have also far outperformed RNG-based betting gaming, such as slots. Operators looking to keep their players engaged during the months ahead would do well to take note.

How do you work symbiotically with consumers, operators and current trends to ensure new and exciting experiences for players? Erik Köhler: As one of the leading gaming providers in the igaming industry, we are working to satisfy both operators and players simultaneously. We are doing this using our Betsoft key tactics – quality, speed to market, innovation and adaptation.

Our skilled team is working on a daily basis to provide the very best slots possible, while our account management team

Erik Köhler

provide the best support and guidance to the operators. By listening to our players and operators, we’re adapting our games, according to their feedback, while still keeping our high quality Betsoft touch.

SS: The exact method of collaboration really depends on the operator, but what’s important is that through our account management team, we find ways to communicate and work together on improvements for player-facing content. Ultimately, it’s the operator’s guidance that helps us define what experience is likely to be the best for their players. After all, they know better what sells to both direct players and to their marketing partners or affiliates. We also see a continuous trend towards a regular need for the operator to create some element of fresh UX all the time, however small or significant it may be. This would require the supplier to be very adaptive and be able to respond quickly to such ideas, and this is exactly what we hope to get even better at with some of our partners later this year.

RH: We gladly sit down with our partners on a regular basis to discuss potential collaborations and insights we can apply to further optimise our delivery. As part of that, we offer a wealth of system bets and in-game features, all of which drive player engagement. We also deliver a highly immersive betting proposition, with elongated betting sessions that ensure a far higher retention rate than other suppliers.

The fact that our games intrinsically attract a lower spend with far more regular

play (as well as lending themselves to the fixed odds outcome format), has ensured that we have been popular with sportsbook customers over the past few months. Key now is to work symbiotically with our partners to ensure that they stick around even with sports betting coming back.

To that end, we’re looking to optimise our products accordingly, and have already reduced the play time for three of our most popular lotteries by 25%. In just a few weeks, this has proven to greatly boost engagement – as well as bet-counts and revenue.

MO: We get continuous feedback from all corners of the industry and use it to build, improve and create ideas; the more data you have to work with, the more you can extrapolate from it. Affiliates, players, operators, employees; and anyone with interest in slot games feed into the information that we can gather. This is fed back to our development teams through internal processes and becomes part of an ever-increasing knowledge database.

We can use this wealth of information to gauge what players feel they’re missing from their slot experiences; what they want to see more of, what they want to see less of, etc. From there, we can fine-tune our development accordingly.

Beyond that, we also want to provide experiences that our customers don’t expect, again bringing innovation into play. Our time in the industry has given us so much knowledge you begin to recognise patterns and paths, and eventually, you can get an informed idea of what is needed next.

How has the pandemic forced a reassessment of strategies to engage and attract new players? MO: As a company that operates mainly in the online space, we were obviously in a strong position to deal with these events when they occurred. Digital entertainment has seen an uptick of activity during these trying times.

Clearly, the strategy to provide great entertainment experiences online was in place already before, not to say the raison d'être for our very existence, so we haven’t seen a need to change anything in that regard fundamentally.

RH: Diversification is going to be essential moving forward. Pre-pandemic, we’d expect to see operators focusing up to 70% of their efforts on sports and nothing else. This has proven to be a tough lesson for many. Operators focusing on retail environments are also going to have to broaden their online presence, as we have no idea when land-based will be returning to ‘normal’.

As betting habits have shown, there also needs to be far more focus on alternatives beyond just RNG-based gaming. Most sportsbook players that have been converted to casino have proven unaccustomed to riding their luck on algorithms. As a result, live-betting products have proven to be a winning strategy – and anyone looking to engage and attract new players during the summer months should take this on board.

Richard Hogg

EK: I believe that I’m not alone when I say that the pandemic came as a shock. There are a lot of players out there who lost their normal routines, and many more players who have now started to gamble for the first time. Since we are focused on casino games, we’ve also seen an uplift from players who previously played the sportsbook, but now have fewer sports to play on. Nevertheless, to be a gambling provider in these times, we feel the responsibility to provide the most responsible slots possible and make sure players feel safe.

SS: Even though as a B2B provider we don’t attract players directly – this is what our customers are good at – the pandemic has, indeed, got every bookmaker thinking on what to do when there are close to no sporting events. Whereas we all believe that situation will get back to normal, something had to be done quickly to recover the massive drop in traffic once every major league went down. Quite predictably, Altenar turned focus to esports and virtuals, and this created an uplift on those verticals. It’s fair to say that all our data and content suppliers have followed the same strategy and we were aligned in our development efforts.

Where do you see the main areas of potential growth? RH: Online is going to be key for the rest of this year and will be a far safer bet than

retail. This is particularly the case for the UK and Europe, which was already struggling before recent events.

Despite betting shops also being far more popular in emerging markets such as Africa and LatAm, I also expect to see the same, and the numbers have backed this up with an accelerated transition to online. With much of the southern hemisphere now entering the winter season, I expect that to continue given we haven’t yet beaten COVID-19.

SS: We have a good network of our existing customers, as well as a number of recently signed deals, so improving the volume and profitability of the existing client base is something we believe to be the main area of growth potential. That’s one of the drivers that we’ve been adding to our regulatory approval list as we are, for example, getting our software approved in Denmark and Portugal at the moment to respond to our existing customers’ expansion in those areas. It’s quite rewarding to grow by helping and seeing our existing partners grow as well.

MO: Diversification through innovation with quality and loads of fun would be the simplest way to put it. When you’re experiencing the next generation of slot entertainment, which is anchored in traditional slot gaming but bringing something new and exciting to the market, it shows an evolution in gaming that’s more complex and immensely enjoyable. We see excellent growth potential in this movement, and we’re excited for the world to see what’s to come.

Obviously, we’re also continually evaluating new markets. Our strategy to operate primarily in regulated markets still is a primary aim. Any market that’s regulated, or making moves towards regulation, is on our radar.

EK: Betsoft Gaming is always looking to grow in general. And speaking of LatAm, we’re expanding there and have completed some interesting partnerships. It’s a very interesting market with great growth potential compared to Europe where the igaming industry has been growing for the past 15 years, but is now quite saturated. We believe our games are specific for different types of players and not targeted to just one or two countries. We have a large portfolio of games that will suit all different players and we believe that will give us a head start growing in LatAm compared to our competitors.

How do you weigh online vs. landbased opportunities?

MO: Land-based entertainment is still a cornerstone of the industry, and that means it can still present plenty of opportunities, as long as you put yourself in a position to take those opportunities.

We’re based in online, but we haven't forgotten the importance of being accessible in a land-based environment. Our portfolio of games can appeal to anyone, in any space around the world, and we have the right product to bring our portfolio of games to land-based casinos, integrated resorts and even shipboard establishments. That product is OMNY, a server-based gaming solution, designed and developed to deliver a functional and flexible multi-channel solution to the challenge of modern gaming.

Right now, we’re focused on bringing great games online and then using our OMNY product as a vehicle to make these games available to land-based as well.

SS: There are various degrees of land-based, and some land-based is really a particular way of using the same online product. We already have some of our customers that make use of our online product in a retail environment, so the land-based concept is not new to us. If we speak of a purely land-based, self-service betting terminal, then that’s something we showcased at ICE 2020 for the first time and are currently getting this product ready to go live in production. The pandemic has had everyone re-evaluate the value of land-based, and whereas it shouldn’t be ignored since it’s still a massive chunk of the industry, online has only been strengthened and transition to it has been accelerated in my opinion.

EK: This is a very interesting topic as land-based casinos have been in existence for many more years than online casinos. I think land-based casinos will be popular for many more years, but eventually will become much smaller, and most land-based will have to either shut down or go online. Most people realised now during the pandemic that we’re living in a digital world, and we’ll manage to run a business online, not only the gambling industry but also many other industries. This is just the start of the online area and it’s growing every day. The online gambling industry is a very good example how we can keep running a business without meeting each other in person.

RH: As a company, we’re live on over 1,300 websites and in over 1,700 retail outlets across four continents, although our strategy is always to be desktop and mobile first, with our retail presence supporting our online operations.

Stanislav Silin

This approach has paid off this year, especially in South Africa. Walk into any betting shop in the country and you’ll most likely have a section devoted to purely BetGames.TV’s products. The strength of our brand means that our partners are able to migrate their retail customers online during lockdown by purely organic means, with retention sitting as high as 35%.

Retail will of course continue to be a key part of our strategy moving forward, but I certainly anticipate that for the next few months, we will be very much focusing on enhancing our online proposition.

Do you have plans to target any other sectors in the industry during this time of uncertainty? SS: We’ve used these times to boost some areas of our product offering that were previously given less focus and attention. We’ve seen an uplift in traffic on the virtuals and esports for example, and that earned us some important experience and has allowed us to improve the product. With the return of the main sporting events, we hope the new types of players we got on esports and virtuals are there to stay.

RH: We’re actively looking to help our partners future-proof against a second wave of the pandemic, particularly in the case of retail. This is especially the case for retail operators who are going to take a significant hit when it comes to social distancing. We’re here to help them migrate online quickly and start diversifying their revenue streams. We’re also looking at increasing our focus on sports-related products in line with our focus on tailoring delivery for our partners and look forward to announcing more soon enough.

MO: The strategies we have for targeting other sectors were in place already last year, and that hasn’t changed. It’s our way to operate with a multi-year plan to base our decisions on meta trends and long-term developments. Quite simply, we have a plan, and we’re sticking to it.

EK: Betsoft gaming is always adapting to keep up with the latest trends and looking for new opportunities. In these times, our main focus will be to provide the most responsible slots. For us, the most important thing is that players feel safe and enjoy playing our games. Together with operators we have a big responsibility. We want to focus on the markets where we can make an impact on responsible gaming and keep gambling fun and thrilling, and not leave our players in financial trouble. We’ll focus on LatAm going forward and keep the responsible knowledge that we have learned from the regulated markets such as Sweden and Italy. I can’t stop pointing out how important it is with responsible gambling in all markets.