Q&A: Evolution CPO on why videogaming firms could shake up gambling
Evolution Gaming chief product officer Todd Haushalter chats to EGR Intel about slots development and the future makeup of the online gambling industry
Online gambling is an industry which is constantly reinventing itself, from new technological innovations to new products, even to new regulations and business practices. However, even an innovative market can become saturated by the same names and the same games.
Todd Haushalter, chief product officer at Evolution Gaming chats to EGR Intel about the best ways to avoid telling the same story with egaming and where the next phase of truly disruptive online gambling products will come from.
EGR Intel: Is the online slots industry becoming too copycat? What would be a truly disruptive slot?
Todd Haushalter (TH): I do think there’s too many copies, it’s bad for the industry and I’d call on operators not to reward that sort of behaviour. What they should say, when someone comes with a copy, is they should say, “I’m not going to take it, you’ve wasted your development money as far as our company is concerned and bring me something fresh”. I don’t even care what it is, it doesn’t have to be another three by five slot machine. Even if it’s a tornado that spins off cash and the houses get spun to the thing that wins the players the money it doesn’t matter. That would be a really healthy practice.
For the second part of the question, yes there’s too many games and maybe 600 games released this year, probably online. To answer this, we must slightly redefine what a slot is. To be a truly disruptive slot we need to redefine slots away from the traditional spinning reels model towards something that’s completely digital. It would be something like launching the Angry Birds game as a game where players fire the birds in exchange for money and there are different scenarios or different levels of jackpot. Alternatively, it could be a pinball game or something like that.
These probably aren’t the best ideas. However, the point is, if I shouted out random ideas for the next five minutes, one of them would be a monster, and then once it works, then you put your foot firmly on the gas and try to own that space. A good recent example of a truly disruptive slot is Megaways which was launched by Big Time Gaming, now everyone wants to licence it. But you’ve also got to be prepared to have a 100% loss on the development process, because for every disruptive idea, there will be five which are disruptive but unrealisable.
EGR Intel: Is there any gambling firm, or even an external firm which has the potential to disrupt the egaming space as much as say an Amazon or Apple have done to their respective markets?
TH: The video game companies are scary because gaming is so natural to them. Many of them already have social casino apps already, such as Zynga for example, Scientific Games has social casino as well and Aristocrat has social casino. These firms have incredible development horsepower and they are world class with data. DraftKings, particularly in the US, has and continues to be a super disruptive firm, and that’s despite being something of an outsider. If you look at the firms who have historically won the day in these sorts of markets, they are mostly outsider-style firms, Google was an outsider, Amazon was an outsider, Apple was an outsider and so on. I think the video game companies are the ones to watch in the future.
EGR Intel: Who do you believe will be the ultimate winners within the industry, firms that are prepared to consolidate or those that are prepared to innovate?
TH: The question suggests that those firms which consolidate won’t innovate and I’m not sure that’s the case. Big companies can still innovate, but consolidation is a distraction, you have to take your eye off the ball, integrate platforms together and you lose some of your roadmap. I’m going to reinterpret the question as who’s going to make the best products. That’s interesting, because it takes money and it takes innovation. I think it’s a game only for big players, as much as I would like to say that someone in a garage creates the next great thing, they can, but it’s expensive to operate it online. It’s an extremely complex environment to operate in. Nowadays you have to support the top 75 devices, I mean, actively support it, repair bugs on the Huawei P7 or some other obscure device. It’s expensive, so I think it will be the divisions of big companies that remain largely autonomous who will have the resources to make the best products going forward.