IT in iGambling: risks, rates and excitement

Nikolai Filimonov, marketing coordinator for the new iGambling practice of DataArt, explained why it was a separate direction to work with casinos and bookmakers, he explained what the gambling business is trying to attract young people, which specialists the industry needs now and what technologies will have the future of luck games.

- What games does GameDev focus on DataArt?
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Nikolay Filimonov: - Now in our company, GameDev-expertise works within the Gambling & Betting-practices, which we recently began to allocate along with, say, Telecom or Travel-practices. In the world, the industry is called iGaming. Inside the company, we prefer to use the term iGambling so that we are not confused with games on iOS. Although, in principle, all these names are equally well-established and unite everything related to casinos, rates and lotteries. iGambling is a regulated industry, and this makes us related to financial and Healthcare practitioners.

- Due to what iGambling can be identified in a separate area of ​​work?

NF: - Practice, first of all, is a marketing concept, and we have been working with a well-known client for more than ten years - Betfair, the world's largest betting exchange in the world. Now, by the way, they are also united with Paddy Power. Cooperation with Betfair is an important indicator, something that can and should be talked about precisely when meeting other representatives of the gaming industry.

- What orders mainly come to iGambling?

NF: - Mostly now we are engaged in the production of slot games - the so-called one-armed bandits. Although there are other classic games for good luck, which may not look like a set of slots. The main thing that unites them is the lack of influence of the player’s skill on the final result. At the same time, the regulators are paying great attention to ensuring that the win really falls randomly, and the game showed a stable percentage of a successful outcome for the player - this has to be proved. That is why the industry has its own world, where the necessary gaming systems are tested, and we help customers meet accepted standards.



- What specialists are in demand in iGambling in the first place?

N. F: - Now we are bringing up front-end developers on our GameDev-courses. An important role is given to artists who are now deeply involved in the development process. And these are artists, not designers. In concrete projects, everything depends on the stage at which we connect to the process: sometimes the game is created from scratch, and in some cases we get a ready-made outdated product and are engaged exclusively in migrating to a new technology. The rest of iGambling for us is the usual for us IT consulting and outsourcing. We welcome a good understanding of the industry, and this comes with experience.

- Gambling - an area divided between large corporations?

NF: - Yes, there are mainly huge companies here. Although now there are also start-up companies, although some of them are parts of larger traditional b2c operators. And just start-ups often from the very beginning try to approach the process as creatively as possible, and with them we sometimes get involved in work at very early stages. That is, often we even come up with the idea of ​​the game, which we will eventually have to realize, together. By the way, it may not cause associations with the slot machine, while maintaining the principle of the game for good luck. Now we can offer our services in game development as the only vendor, partner, outsourcing and consulting company.

- Possession of what technologies when developing games comes to the fore?

NF: - For everyone who is directly involved in the development of browser games, HTML 5 Canvas has become the main tool. In development, we mainly use the framework pixi.js and phaser.js

- And yet, most developers need to know HTML5?

N. F .: - Yes, after the outdated Flash, games began to be actively written on HTML5: they can be easily launched from mobile phones, placed in online casinos, social networks, and at the same time the same toys can be put on real machines in gaming spaces ordinary, offline casinos. In addition, the migration of existing HTML5 Flash games can be called one of the most common orders for any GameDev team. Gaming machines in a casino can afford heavy gaming assets that can take up more gigabytes. Our artists are optimizing assets, and the game is getting smaller by an order of magnitude.

- Besides gamedev, what else does DataArt do in the iGambling industry?

NF: - iGambling is not limited to creating new games. For example, with Betfair we just did more than a hundred projects, among which there were no games at all. GameDev is a great way to get acquainted with the company in order to establish a long-term relationship. After all, the business interests of large industry players are usually diverse, while the industry itself is very close, despite its enormous scale. There are few companies here, and even without wide coverage of cooperation, you are quickly becoming recognized.

A typical need for our services appears when a land-based casino goes online. Online sportsbook and casino operators need to integrate or increase the total value of customer collaboration with Big Data and player segmentation. And, of course, everyone wants to be present on mobile and wearable devices. Platform manufacturers for operators need a rapid increase in production capacity for large IT projects; we can also help with this.

- Competition in the market is intensifying? Are companies looking for new technological solutions that can attract customers?

NF: - Studies of the behavior of young people - millennials like myself - show that the casino as such does not particularly care about them. That is, it’s just boring to keep track of the roulette ball or slots of a one-armed gangster. That is why young people now come to the casino to talk with friends there, take advantage of some special offers in clubs, but not for what the owners of this business expect from them. Therefore, there have been attempts to combine luck games with developmental games, adding elements of logic skills and dexterity games to traditional slot machines. But what to do with this idea is not completely clear - I have not yet seen successful attempts to implement it. Another option is to make games interesting solely due to new technologies. And here the future is potentially a virtual reality. Now we are working on a large promising project, designed specifically for land-based-casinos - the machines themselves will be supplemented with VR-glasses, and although the gameplay does not change, the sensations will be completely different. Where else can you literally shower with streams of gold coins?

- Has the decline in interest in the gambling process itself hit the market?

N. F .: - I would say that in general, the gaming market is now on the rise, in any case, this concerns the online casino. There are a lot of reasons for this, first of all, changes in legislation. Part of the ban was lifted in Eastern Europe, for example, in Romania and Poland. In the US, lobbyists are constantly struggling to reduce the pressure of regulators, and the game industry continues to develop in Asia. Well, the UK is still a huge platform - a whole national tradition has lined up around the iGaming industry.

- Which includes sports betting? And is this part of the gaming industry 100% iGambling?

NF: - Companies involved in casinos often offer betting services, and vice versa. Both are pure luck games, for the simple reason that you don’t affect the result, on which winning or losing depends.

- In general, is iGambling to any of the practices that existed in the company before?

NF: - It was no coincidence that we decided to consider it separately: the iGambling world has its own specifics. But we can benefit from experience from different industries: not only from Media & Entertainment, but also, for example, from finance. Or here's an example when we may need the help of IoT-practice: now we want to make friends with the manufacturer of video cameras for the casino. Thousands and tens of thousands of cameras can be installed in one casino, and, since we are talking about software and analyzing data from a large number of devices, our IoT practice can be interesting.