eGR: How long had you been working with Plumbee before entering into a partnership with them? Daniel Lindberg (DL): We started working on our business plan about a year ago, which was pretty much the same time they started with theirs, so we’ve been in talks with them since last year. The agreement was signed just after the summer although in principle we were in agreement with them long before then. We knew Raf [Plumbee CEO Raf Keustermans] from him having worked at Unibet when Joachim [Timmermans], one of the co-founders of Quickspin, was at the same company – there was more of a personal relationship and that helped. eGR: In making the switch from real-money gambling to social, what sort of things have surprised you, and what things had you been expecting? DL: There aren’t that many differences, but one of the main things is that the primary target audience is different if you look at real-money gambling as opposed to social. In the betting and gambling industry we’d generally have males in their mid-20s or mid-30s whereas in the social space there’s a lot more from the US market, more females and generally older, so that’s why we started with softer, fairytale themes in [our ?rst product] Mirrorball Slots. Placing a traditionally male game in a female market would not work as well as the other way round, but I wouldn’t say that we are going to rule out the main audience either. eGR: How big a team do you have at Quickspin? DL: We currently have a team of seven but we have another three signing up by May and the aim is to have about 15 people by the end of the year. We will have a development speed of roughly 68 games a year. It’s quite amazing to see the speed – we used to be part of a big organisation with around 350 employees in NetEnt, and we have more or less the same level of development pace as they have, with far less resources. This is vital for social considering the importance of speed to market, and I think adding new games and new features to that will be important for Plumbee’s success, as well as our own. eGR: Is everything going to be free-play to begin with? DL: To begin with, yes, and it will only be on Facebook. We’re a pure games development company and will distribute our games both towards the social market and the traditional gambling market, but within social we have this exclusive agreement in place with Plumbee. We consider Plumbee in the same way that we’d consider any company in the gaming market, in that we provide them with our content, although its only solely free-to-play as long as the Facebook market remains solely free-to-play. For any real-money gambling market our partnership is non-exclusive. Of course, it would be up to Plumbee to decide what to do in terms of whether or not they want to move into the real-money market. eGR: What, if any, real-money partnerships are you working towards? DL: With the background we have – I have more than ?ve years’ experience from NetEnt and all the agreements NetEnt has signed over the last ?ve years have been the result of my work or the team I was responsible for – our contact network is largely within the gambling space. That has been a parallel focus for us over the last couple of months and hopefully I can come back soon with a new announcement about distribution channels and operators signed up on gambling, where we’re currently in the ?nal stages.
eGR: What sets Quickspin apart from the competition? DL: Quickspin started out as a game development studio focusing on developing products for the gambling industry. We felt that when we met the sites there weren’t that many companies that made what we perceived as highquality content – by that we mean the right kind of level when it comes to graphics, and so on. That’s where the whole idea started, and if you take that quality aspect and look at the social market it is so much lower. If you take any of the slot games on Facebook t