iGaming Business magazine iGB 112 Sept/Oct 2018 | Page 27

Casino & Games
“Speed is the most important thing
because we are growing like crazy and we
need to keep up with all the new
business that is coming in”
Red Tiger had 15 integrations in progress as we discussed
the new system, which shows how much more efficient
self-integration is when you consider it took three
years to integrate the first 30. “It’s important to
bear in mind that we have two different types
of users, the operators and the players, and we
have to look after both of them,” Hamilton says.
The emphasis on getting the infrastructure
right before all else appears to have been a
lynchpin of the Red Tiger way of doing things
from the beginning. It didn’t release a single
game for the first nine months it was operational,
concentrating instead on creating a framework, or ‘base
game’, that all future games would be built on, perfecting the
mechanics but also making it easier to adapt and release games at
scale. New game features are first built into the base game application,
such that all games require a subset of that functional code library.
The suppliers’ first game, Dragon’s Luck, went live in 2015
and remains the studio’s most popular release to date. Its first
European client was Betfair. At that time Red Tiger had only
produced a range of Asian-themed games, so Betfair put them
all on an exclusive Macau tab on the site, considerably enhancing
their visibility. Today the UK makes up 40% of Red Tiger’s overall
revenue, with Scandinavia and other European countries making
up the remainder.
After a recent refurb, it’s hard to walk round the Sofia hub
without forgetting you’re in the poorest country in the EU.
From the big red jeep that greets you at the entrance
to the state-of-the-art games rooms, kitchens and
other amenities, it’s more Silicon Valley than
South Eastern Europe. But the emphasis on
process and efficiency is palpable.
Unusually for a modern business the
office is not open plan. There are designated
offices for each team, one of which comprises
three in-house musicians who write and
perform the music and voices for all the games.
Apart from the musicians, the office is silent.
Curtains are drawn in the developers’ offices to avoid
being distracted by the view of Sofia’s surrounding mountains,
while the graphic designers, mathematicians and others seem
to prefer the daylight. Everyone is hyper-focused on their part of
the process.
i GamingBusiness | Issue 112 | September/October 2018
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