Playing by the rules

Igor Kozhurenko is the leader of iGaming in DataArt - about traditional and online casinos, regulation of the gambling market in different countries, about the fashion for virtual reality and the search for artists and engineers.

About the iGaming industry

Companies providing online gaming services are always ready for the rapid introduction of innovations, and for the first time many ideas are embodied in iGaming. There are several reasons for this. The first is the struggle for customers: the better the service, the more understandable it will be users. The second is cash flow. Successful companies in this market do not need additional investments, they have money, and they are happy to invest them in development and development, if they understand that this is really necessary.
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For the last year and a half, we have been actively building iGaming expertise, which, I hope, will be officially turned into industrial practice in the near future. The market for this industry is very large, and companies of various types work there. But we are focusing on large corporations, whose annual turnovers are measured in billions of dollars, and we are doing this successfully - over the past year we have signed five new customers.

About talent search

Last September, we built a DataArt game development studio. We started from scratch and honestly told our first client, Glück Games, that at the moment there is no expertise inside the company, but there are experienced people who are ready to form a team. We found artists and JavaScript GameDev-developers, made a project, and now our studio works with three or four companies at once.

People with experience in GameDev never sit without work; therefore, their search is an important area, which we are also developing as part of our expertise. Inside DataArt we attract developers due to interesting projects and excellent furnishings, in addition, we have prepared our own training course.

From the point of view of the technologies themselves, there are much more similarities with other industries than differences. For example, sports betting platforms are very similar to trading platforms. There are also high requirements for backend development: huge data streams, a large number of users connected via desktops and mobile devices, the need to constantly optimize data flow, a powerful layer of analytics. At the same time, keen competition in iGaming makes us constantly move forward.

About trends

Gambling companies are in the forefront, for example, in such super popular directions as virtual, added and mixed reality. At the ICE Totally Gaming exhibition in London in February 2016, there were only two stands of companies representing virtual reality technology. At the Global Gaming Expo in Las Vegas in September, I counted nine such stands. There is a trend, at the next event there will be about 15-20 pieces, or even more.

We do not yet have finished products using these technologies, but there are already test benches. Developers see great prospects in this, operators are less optimistic yet, but this year many companies have managed to release excellent VR products. We have proposals for classic land-based casinos for the addition of slot machines with virtual reality or the complete replacement of classic machines. This may attract new people, especially young people - older people usually go to land-based casinos, but such technological solutions can change the situation.

It is very interesting to follow the situation with augmented reality, the more the success of Pokemon proved its viability. We ourselves have come up with several cases for traditional casinos, and negotiations with operators are very positive. The following trend is now being traced: if 20 years ago, all the automatic machines were mechanical - coins were pouring out with a corresponding sound, then now the casino is quiet. Therefore, the atmosphere is not the same as it was before. Here, using augmented reality, you can come up with a lot of additional entertainment, followed by people in general, and come to the casino. This is especially noticeable in Las Vegas, where people have long come not in the hope of getting rich, but just to rest, often with their whole families. It is visited by 40 million people a year, and according to my feelings, the casinos themselves, which can already be visited like a museum, are far from the main thing. Las Vages is like a luxurious Disneyland, with a huge number of different shows, and augmented reality technology in gaming halls there will also look organic.

About projects

The development of one online slot game lasts an average of three to four months, and a team of five people takes care of it. By and large, here everything is the same as in projects of other industries: there is a UI, there is a backend, communication protocols. But even the differences in terminology are important. For example, a designer in game development is called graphics artist, PM is a game producer, a business analyst is a game designer. The specification is called des doc - design document. Plus, there are also experts who are engaged in animation and write music.

Many very large companies serve land-based casinos: slot machines, table games, etc. In view of the general care of the Internet, they also need to go online: they want to prepare their successful games for the web and mobile phones. Here in the first place JavaScript-technology HTML5: we take the assets, the gameplay of the game, written in C ++ or another language, and in unchanged form we translate it into a format suitable for the Internet.

From a large client in the UK ReflexGaming, for example, we received a set of graphics larger than 1 GB. But by joint efforts of ours with the customer, artists and developers made the game weighing 40 MB, no different from the original in functionality. We are currently negotiating with several large companies to transfer their land-based games to online, based on this case study.

A separate category that we would very much like to develop is social casinos. Unlike classic online casinos, you play them not for money, but using virtual chips. Suppose you have 5,000 chips a day, you play them, have fun, and when they are over, you can either just wait for the next day, or buy them for real money. So far, we have no experience in this area, but we are negotiating with the first major client.

In addition to the game development itself, we have projects for large clients, including back-end and front-end, full-stack development for web and mobile services. Through game development, accessing them is easier, but we use this advantage to develop and cover the needs of our customers in other areas already, serving internal marketing and analytics systems.

About transparency

The rules of the game are always clearly defined - the fact that the casino is deceiving people is a myth. Any land-based casino is an absolutely transparent organization, where it is clear where the money comes from, where you can find information about which winnings fell and when. Casinos love to share this data, as this is an important method of attracting customers. For example, for each slot game in an online casino, parameters are written, the main one is rtp, “return to player” is the percentage of money that the machine returns to the players. It may differ in volatility — it may be many small gains or quite a few big gains — but on average, rtp within the industry is 95–97%. That is, the casino takes only 3-5% of turnover, the remaining amount in one way or another is distributed among customers.



The main parameters are set as initial, but we calculate all the internal mathematics: how many elements are there in the slot, what mini-games are built into it, etc. We prepare such calculations at the border of business intelligence and mathematics: probability theory, combinatorics. And within the framework of our expertise, we are working not only with classic slot games, but also with skill and skill games - skill games.

About regional differences

The main country for our work is the United Kingdom. Historically, it is the most stable, all the rules are clear there, the legislation rarely changes, and the situation with taxes is absolutely transparent. In addition to Great Britain, the most important regions for us are Western Europe: Sweden, Germany, Malta and Gibraltar. And, of course, we work with multinational corporations headquartered in the United States.

Regional differences depend on existing laws. Both online gambling and traditional land-based-casinos are allowed somewhere, only land-based is legal somewhere, in some countries iGaming can only deal with a regular casino. In America, these issues are regulated at the state level.

In Western Europe in recent years there has been a tendency to liberalize legislation regarding gambling. For example, in Switzerland, gambling is allowed only in land-based casinos, but discussions are already under way in parliament on the legalization of online activities.

In Sweden, the market is monopolized by the state, but even here in parliament there is already a paper on admitting foreign companies to the market. In general, from year to year the market expands, including all new countries. The industry provides a good income to the state, moreover, if this activity is regulated, there is practically no place for dishonest players in it.

About different games

Slot machines are the backbone business of any casino. But we, for example, have a client, a very large lottery-operator, for whom we make games that fill the empty niche between the lotteries and the classic casino. The psychology of the player in the lottery is different from the psychology of the player in a one-armed gangster or from those who make bets on sports. The latter believe that they understand what they are doing: they follow the events, count the statistics. Those who play in a casino are looking for pure entertainment: they love to watch something spinning, enjoy the atmosphere. Or just long press the buttons online. Those who play the lottery want a one-time action - buy a ticket to get the result in a week. There is a mixed type of people: they do not want to sit still for a long time, but it is interesting for them to spend some time playing. For them, and invented games such as scratch cards, high / low - instant lottery or "who has more" - where a simple action gives a quick result. For example, we made a very successful game, Snakes And Ladders: we calculated math, made a successful design, and it just got safely to the site of this operator.

About exhibitions

We attend four to five events a year and prepare very carefully for them. The biggest event in the industry is the London ICE Totally Gaming. There are casinos, and bookmakers, and analytical agencies, and payment systems - usually more than 400 participants. The huge exhibition center is always full, and the places there are very expensive, and most of the exhibitors are focused on the online business. This event is number one, and we consider it our home event - they even held a private party there this year.

But I must say that every exhibition we visited gave us new opportunities - in general, just in the gaming industry events is a very important source of new customers.



As for Las Vegas, huge global corporations are based there. There is an opportunity to meet with the stakeholders of the top companies - then you can continue to cooperate, say, in the UK. The specificity of business in the United States is that decisions are made very quickly, so the exhibition time is enough to agree on something at a place at least in advance. The main difference between Las Vegas and London is that participants here are mainly interested in the development of traditional casinos. Chic stands, great products, new monitors, new places, new ideas for multiplayer, roulettes - a lot of interesting things. However, five years ago, I would say that we are not interested in this - after all, we are developing software. But now we are absolutely sure that even land-based-companies always have a need to do something on the Internet.

Now we are considering a trip to Macau next year - this is another city where you can meet with the stakeholders of global gambling companies. By the way, we already have clients in Southeast Asia.