INSIGHT
slots. The next biggest area is table games.
If we look at the different markets, table
games are more popular in the UK than
Scandinavia, for example, where slots are
very popular.
You have various licensing agreements
in place with Universal and 20th Century
Fox, among others. How do these slots
perform compared to their non-licensed
counterparts? Do they tend to gain
traction more quickly?
Branded games are a very good tool
for bringing in new customers into the
casino, but existing players are also
curious. If you are a South Park fan,
you feel you have to test the South Park
game! With branded slots, we always have
high traffic in the beginning, and then
depending on how good the game is, it
settles at a certain level. We saw a lot of
traffic from the South Park slot when that
launched, and launched a second South
Park title on October 23rd.
You recently announced your entry
to the North American markets in 2015.
How will your strategy differ there
compared to that in Europe?
Online casino is currently only allowed
in New Jersey and Delaware, so we will
start in New Jersey. We see our content
as superior to that on offer in New Jersey
today, so we are very confident the players
will really like what they see when we
launch our games there next year. There
are a lot of conservative people from the
land-based industry that are doing their
upmost to keep online away, but it will
come, and it’s just a matter of time when
we see more states opening up. The next
states will most likely be Pennsylvania
and the more liberal East Coast states, and
also California, but it’s hard to predict
exactly when that will happen. Some
states will never open to online casino,
such as Utah, but we are confident the
most important, and largest, will come
online sooner or later.
see it take on greater importance
than in normal online casino markets.
It’s good to have these products in
our portfolio, and we hope to see an
increase there as well. Our agreement
with GTECH, which is one of the main
“We know that other people are copying our games,
because they are successful, and we know we are
driving the online casino market, because our games are
superior to others’. We are used to that.”
How much of your business is now
being driven via mobile devices, and
how do you expect this to grow over the
next 12-24 months?
We reported in Q3 that 16.5% of revenues
came from mobile games, and we
continue to have fantastic growth and that
figure will no doubt rise over the coming
quarters. The nice thing is that we aren’t
seeing any impact on desktop revenues, as
these are continuing to grow.
So you haven’t yet seen any
cannibalization of desktop
revenues by mobile?
No, not yet, it will do one day for sure,
but the thing is that if you are at home,
you tend to prefer the bigger screen and
the higher quality sound you get on the
desktop. Mobile devices are getting bigger
and more powerful, so they will take over
one day, but not 100%.
You also develop lottery-style games.
Will this be an increased focus for
you going forward, or will it remain
complementary to the core business?
It’s more of a supplement, but also
when we go into World Lottery
Association (WLA) markets, we will
suppliers to the WLA, means we can
now access markets we have not been
able to address before. We have an
agreement with Lottomatica in Italy,
and through our partnership with
GTECH, we hope to see many more
lotteries offer our games. It will take
some time, but having a door opened for
us by GTECH is very good.
You launched live dealer casino
around 18 months ago, as a relatively
late entrant to the market. How is this
performing?
It’s performing well, in line with our
plans. It’s growing steadily, but being
second mover and coming in a little bit
late, it takes some time to get everything
going. We have signed up quite a lot of
new customers, and not all of them have
launched yet, so we will see continued
growth in that area. We are very
pleased with our product, because it’s
technologically more advanced than the
competition. That’s the advantage of
being a second mover. The disadvantage
is that all the customers have signed up
with the first movers, but we see there is a
market, and that we can stand side to side
with our competitors.
iGB Affiliate Issue 48 DEC/JAN 2014/2015
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