Spreading good Kama

EGR NA: Can you talk us through the genesis of the company and how it grew to the size it is today?

Daniel Kashti (DK): KamaGames started over six years ago as a development team that had the simple premise to produce a better poker game than what was available at the time.

After the huge success of Pokerist, which launched in 2010, KamaGames opened the head office in Dublin. We then went on to open offices in other key markets including UK (2016) and China (2017).

The next title to launch was Roulettist, which was followed with a Blackjack game and several more casual games. In May 2016 we launched our very first social casino title that featured fully motion captured 3D graphics – Blackjackist. Our Baccarat game, Baccarist, followed the year after along with Omaha poker for Pokerist.

More broadly speaking, KamaGames has grown from a single product company with a successful title on desktop, into a portfolio, mobile-first company with a massive footprint and constant presence at the top of the charts across the world. We have done that while establishing our own brand identity which we think can give a differentiating factor in this space.

Over the past six years KamaGames has built up a solid DAU (Daily Active Users) of around one million, received a number of accolades as a company and have reached a number of milestones over this short period of time.

This growth and recognition is testament to the fantastic teams KamaGames has across the world both in product development and also across publishing too.

As well as having a strong B2C presence with a strong portfolio, KamaGames has diversified its offering to cater for the B2B market too and in the past three years we have expanded our reach over and above our own apps in the Apple, Google and Windows stores.

EGR NA: How have your new tournament modes gone?

DK: Over the past couple of years KamaGames has stepped up its game and released some really exciting and well received new games and features. These include 3D BlackJack, Baccarat, Omaha, Weekly Tournaments and more. We have also built all of our games into a single app making it even faster and simpler for players to cross-play and carry their friends’ lists, achievements and chip balances across all games. We’ve deepened the social features on the platform, and we have put a huge amount of focus on perfecting our live ops, including promos, support, economy and black market management.

On top of that, we have spent time further boosting our multiplayer tournament offering and most recently announced a brand new tournament format for Roulettist, which we expect to be popular with many of our players.

As market leader, it’s important for us to be able to innovate and to try out new gaming mechanics. There is something very refreshing in our recently introduced Poker Modes games which makes the experience much more exciting and entertaining to our mainstream players. While it is still at a very early stage (we only released four out of five modes so far), the reaction from players has been phenomenal. The games are available for 48 hours every week and during the first couple of weeks over 200,000 players were playing the games, with an average of nearly 30 hands per player. 

Daniel Kashti – Chief Marketing & Commercial Officer – KamaGames

EGR NA: You’ve had several successful partnerships with messaging services – what are some of the benefits you see?

DK: Messaging platforms are the most socially engaging applications available on the App Store and have been for a number of years. For us it was about giving users the ability to play our social games with or against their messenger connections in the simplest way possible. It’s an additional layer of what makes our games truly social.

Although the functionality of each messenger has lot of similarities, the makeup of each user base is very different (eg. Tango has a good presence in North America and the Middle East while Viber is more emerging markets with a different age profile).

Ultimately, bringing our games to social messaging apps has helped in further expanding our distribution opportunities. We have partnered with companies that are at the top of their game, and that were able to bring both their brand value as well as a significant amount of quality players to our platform to play with and against KamaGames’ global player base.

Overall, the strategy to utilize messaging apps’ reach to targeted demographics, coupled with our existing global player base and optimized live ops has proven successful.

EGR NA: What benefits have you seen from the Poker Night in America partnership? Are you looking for any more partners in this area?

DK: The partnership with Poker Night in America is part of KamaGames’ ongoing expansion and development of its partnerships business. We have made a strategic decision to open our gaming platforms to a number of selected partners. Given Poker Night in America‘s unique and passionate approach to the game of poker, we were very happy to partner with them and to build a game that will cater for this unique audience.

We are still at the early stages of the partnership (which was launched late June 2017), but what we have seen so far is that Poker Night’s players are among the most engaged and retained players out there.  Using TV, and leveraging Poker Night’s platform to drive acquisition of high quality users has proven valuable so far.

EGR NA: How’s your Asian expansion going? What have you learnt from early efforts? What’s the importance of ‘local’ games?

DK: Over the past 18 months KamaGames has seen significant and steady growth in Asia, specifically in China and in the past 12 months we have seen a three-fold growth in revenues on the iOS platform alone. We obviously believe that the market is there, and that there is a demand for our type of games, despite the region being relatively crowded with strong operators, both local and international. We recently launched our office in Beijing and are in the process of adapting our games to culturally fit in with the different regions.

We also recently entered into a partnership with the Chinese gaming giant Yoozoo Games to target the Indian market. Yoozoo is at the top of its game when it comes to gaming and mobile titles. Working with such a strong and influential developer and distributor will help us build our business and expand into this very exciting and important market and further grow the social poker scene there. We expect to replicate this model as we deepen our footprint in other markets in the region too.

EGR NA: What are the company’s plans for the future?

DK: From a product point of view, we plan to continue to develop the social layer of our games, making P2P interaction more engaging and natural. We will also continue to innovate with more games that cater for different segments – similar to the Pro Tables for the more advanced and VIP players, and the different Poker Modes tournaments for the more casual players.

On the portfolio side, KamaGames plans to push on with three to four new game releases every year. Games will continue to be managed as a portfolio and will share one account and one wallet as they do now.  This is a very strong proposition that is unique to our platform which has benefits both on the B2C as well as on the B2B side. We will also continue developing a strong back-end infrastructure that allows us to offer a personalized gaming experience to players around the world. Perfecting our live ops will also play a key role in our successful future growth.

As a group, KamaGames is dedicated to continuing to push the boundaries in search of what’s next. We are growing at a rate of 1.2 million registered users per month, and that expanding fan base is across the Middle East, Europe, the Americas and Asia and so we hope to continue that extraordinary rate of growth. We will continue to experiment with new technologies and distribution platforms, like we have with VR and HTML5, to continue to entertain and excite our new and existing players.