The game changers blurring the line between casino products and video games

The crossover between the traditional video gaming world and the egaming industry has a lot more depth than one might expect. Gamification as a means for boosting customer retention and loyalty is already widely considered an effective method for online gambling operators, but with many industry veterans hailing from the colourful world of traditional gaming, the argument for closer ties between the two industries in terms of operations and product development is a fascinating and extremely underrated one.

It may be effortless for a prolific gamer like myself to spot the hidden links between the two industries, both of which place heavy precedence on onboarding new players and maintaining strong customer loyalty, but with many video game developers and egaming operators and suppliers hailing from the tech-centric city of Stockholm, there may be more similarities than most might expect.

“Sweden has, for a lot of reasons, been a growth spot for games in general, and cool IT businesses,” says Thomas Rosander, CEO of online casino Dunder and former engagement director for Electronic Arts (EA). “People are very tech savvy and there is a culture that shows it is good to build start-ups as that’s the way to make a difference and also make some money in a socialist country like Sweden.”

What’s the difference?

However, both sectors also share very obvious differences. Egaming developers, for example, are pressured to pump out new slots games as often as possible, due to the fact product roadmaps are much shorter than those in the computer gaming world. “It would be really cool if in egaming we could get away from volume-driven strategies,” Rosander tells EGR Technology.

“[Disruption] doesn’t exist in the egaming business. It’s not open to crazy, game-changing ideas,” he boldly claims. “[In video gaming] the big publishers have their brands that they keep building on, but the disruptive operators have a vision and a good idea, and they start out small. Then, once they see people find the game really attractive, and there is high customer retention, they continue to build on it.”

Joachim Timmermans, co-founder and CPO at Stockholm-based slots developer Quickspin, echoes Rosander’s comment, adding that the timeframe for turning around a new slot game is mere weeks compared to a few years for a traditional video game.

Yet, both also seem to agree that the quick pace and opportunity for innovation in egaming is what makes it a much more enticing sector to work in. “The thing that is most exciting about the egaming industry is the pace of development,” Timmermans adds.

“This speed of delivery is what graphic artists love about working for Quickspin compared to a video game developer. In the slots industry, they can see the projects that they work on go live regularly and be instantly enjoyed by players. By contrast in the video games industry, the same amount of time can be spent designing trees and shrubberies that will serve as background for a single game’s main action.”

The rise of social

Timmermans’ career background includes a stint as marketing and product development manager at an indie game developer in Belgium, called Larian Studios. He also spent over four years advising London-based social casino start-up Plumbee (acquired by Sony’s GSN Games in 2016).

As a vertical, social casino has done a great deal to bridge the gap between traditional gaming and egaming, and in recent years well-established firms on both sides have dabbled in social casino in an effort to expand their offerings, appeal to a much wider customer base and meet the growing demand for online casino games.

Not least is the grandfather of video gaming, SEGA, which released a mobile slots app in January for both iOS and Android. The firm stopped producing consoles in the early noughties and has turned to social casino to revive some of its much-loved characters.

The most prominent of the games available on the app is Sonic the Hedgehog as it takes players back in time to arguably the finest era for gaming, the early 1990s and the introduction of the Sega Megadrive console.

SEGA has launched a FTP slots game featuring its most-loved characters

An online gambling veteran and early pioneer of the video game industry, Jez San, reflects fondly on the 90s and its wealth of video game innovation. It was during this period that his game development company, Argonaut Games, flourished and produced its most well-known game, Star Fox, for the Super Nintendo. “I loved the computer games world and I grew up with it,” San says.

“Argonaut was unusual as a computer games company because it was also a technology company, it had very strong technology and it designed the first 3D graphics chip, which was for Nintendo. So, the first ever GPU. Before there were GPUs for PCs, we did this 3D chip for Nintendo called the super FX chip and that was the first computer game 3D chip in the early 90s.”

In 2004, San thought to combine his two passions for video games and poker by building PKR, a real-money poker product that incorporated the 3D visuals of a video game with the growing clamour for online poker.

At the time of its release in 2006, players were blown away by the impressive visuals and smooth gameplay, which included lighthearted quirks like buying ‘drinks’ for opponents and performing chip tricks.

“Up until that time, [poker] games were very two dimensional, flat and boring, but PKR was beautiful 3D graphics,” San says. “PKR.com was an idea to make an online poker game that had graphics and was as good as a computer game, but with the business model of an online poker company.”

While PKR is now defunct, the world’s largest poker site, PokerStars, has made a similar crossover into video gaming with its VR release. The free-toplay poker product, which is available on popular online gaming platform Steam, is said to offer “visually stunning environments, realistic chip and card movements, an endless supply of interactive toys, props and accessories” for a similarly engaging experience as PKR.

On reflection, former PKR players look back on the ground-breaking product with the same keen nostalgia as console gamers. And with the recent revival of many gaming classics on PlayStation 4 (including the original Crash Bandicoot) and the Nintendo Switch, there is obviously an appetite for renewed versions of old games.

San, though, is quick to criticise most casino games for their lack of highquality gameplay. “The games are quick and dirty,” he notes. Like Rosander, he looks down on the rapid-fire nature of casino game releases. “There’s a few exceptions – some companies make excellent games like NetEnt, for instance. Their games stand out, but there’s a number of the online games out there that are very poor quality compared to computer games where you can see that they spent enormous amounts of time and love creating the games, and that often is missing in online casino.”

But having worked on and launched companies on both sides of the coin, San says he does not prefer one sector to the other. “The thing about computer games is there’s a lot of talent and a lot of creativity and intelligence. It’s actually a very competitive world and you have to work really, really hard to make things that will stand out.

Whereas in casino gaming it’s a lot easier to make games that stand out because there’s actually a lot of low quality games,” he explains. On the other side Like San and Rosander, the CTO at Swedish casino games developer Yggdrasil, Krzyzstof Opałka, was enticed into egaming from Candy Crush creator King, where he worked as a developer.

Last year, he told EGR Technology he was poached by Yggdrasil with the promise of building an entire development team from scratch to create their own engaging and innovative portfolio of slots games.

“In bigger companies you don’t have much impact on movements, so being able to do something from scratch, also in my hometown of Krakow, I knew I would be able to build a really good team because I knew I could rely on certain people’s skills,” Opałka said.

Rosander points out that some developers may be lured into egaming on the promise of making more money. “Egaming has been seen as a way to earn fast money but that’s now changing because it’s not that easy anymore as there needs to be differentiation.”

Rosander moved to EA from bwin.party where he had worked on the firm’s poker product. He was tasked with developing EA’s free-to-play vertical, along with a host of other egaming professionals. “The reason for that was egaming was ahead of traditional gaming in terms of marketing and how to do things digitally. We mainly came from the poker business.

We immediately thought that EA, with their huge great IPs, would make this area massive, but they were scared because they had so much to lose,” Rosander reveals.

The struggle of working for a huge video game distributor is echoed by Jez San: “As the game creator, we were held to ransom by the distributors and we couldn’t get our games on the shelf unless we toed the line and did what they asked for, whereas now, when computer games creators make a game, they can get it into the player’s hands through online app stores.”

Indeed, it was the inception of online app stores like Apple and Google’s mobile emporiums and their console equivalents – Xbox Live and PlayStation Store – that threatened the monopoly that big distributors like EA had enjoyed.

In the book Minecraft: The Unlikely Tale of Markus “notch” Perssonand the Game that Changed Everything, authors Daniel Goldberg and Linus

Larsson suggest that this was the turning point for indie developers, and EA faced an impending doom now that these studios could access the wider gaming audience themselves.

Tight shackles San also highlights the difficulties online casinos face with game distribution. Up until last year, real money gambling apps were banned from Google Play. “[Now] it’s very specific territories [that allow real money gambling apps] which means that the majority of casino games have to access their players either through websites and not actually downloadable apps,” says San.

And he flags up the stringent regulations that affect online gambling, adding that traditional games can be just as addictive, but developers and distributors are not legally obliged to be socially responsible. “The difference in gaming and casino gaming is that [the latter] is highly regulated, the rules are very clear and there’s a lot of testing and very strict rules on fairness and protecting the vulnerable.”

Minecraft creator Markus Persson has famously exposed big distributors in the past, particularly his former employer Midasplayer, a Swedish off -shoot of King. Persson quit his highly paid position as a developer in the early days of Minecraft’s inception, as the firm was not supportive of his side project and expected staffers to put all their energy into developing games.

Minecraft helped put indie video game developers on the map

Coincidentally, Jonas Mårtensson, former VP and now CEO of the firm that developed Minecraft, the Stockholm-based Mojang, cut his gaming teeth at Betsson as business development director and head of mobile from 2011 to 2013.

Now, Mårtensson is a member of Swedish investment group AGOF, a venture capital outfit investing in both egaming and traditional gaming companies. AGOF’s most recent investments include Casumo and slots supplier Push Gaming, as well as a Swedish mobile games developer called FunRock.

It seems the link between both gaming industries is pretty deep rooted then. AGOF CEO Markus Blom says Mårtensson’s expertise is invaluable to the investment fund. “Having him on board is very beneficial for us because of his background in the gambling industry at Betsson. He understands that better than many.”

Blom adds: “Also, he understands how to run a mobile gaming company, so he is the perfect crossover between both industries. We will have a foot in both industries, maybe shifting slightly more into traditional gaming going forward. His input and his knowledge and experience is very valuable.”

Blom highlights San’s earlier point on regulation, noting that it has had an impact on investors who are directing their attention to traditional gaming as the industry does not face regulatory constraints.

“Both industries have grown quite rapidly in Sweden if you look at the stock market. Investors here tend to like both industries. It’s shifted over a little more into traditional gaming and if you listen to investors, it tends to have a lot to do with regulation because traditional gaming is not regulated, so you don’t need to take that into consideration when investing. It’s pure entertainment. But most investors see the crossover more and more, and it’s a natural one.”

Both industries certainly have a great deal to learn from one another. One similarity shared by each industry veteran in this article is their love for playing games. Each admits that gaming is a favourite pastime of theirs and it is often the case that with passion comes hard work and inspiration.

The latest gaming sensation has been Fortnite, a first-person shooter that has incorporated RPG and fantasy elements into its gameplay, essentially merging two of the most popular video gaming genres of today.

Rosander also touches on free-to-play mobile games like Candy Crush and how they have gained a huge amount of traction with the non-gambling masses. “Operators are also trying to embrace different ways [of approaching new players] but they also have a long way to go,” he concludes.

Drawing inspiration from video games is playing a leading role in operators’ attempts to entice a new, younger generation of bettors. Furthermore,

He adds: “A lot of discussions are around attracting millennials and I think the traditional slots games are not very applicable. I think the gambling industry needs to look towards other industries to appeal to the new generation.

“It’s natural to look at the crossover [between egaming and traditional gaming]. For us, both industries are interesting, and we will continue to invest in both,” Blom concludes.