Pulse


OPEN GAMING ARCHITECTURE BLACK COW TECHNOLOGY


Max Francis, CEO, CTO and Founder of Black Cow Technology, assesses how the gaming industry's


expectations of what an RGS should do has changed. A techie at heart, Max critiques a lack of innovation in game development despite significant technical advancements in software systems and solution architecture since the turn of the century.


Black Cow Technology: we build, you innovate


What's kept you in the industry and where does your passion for gaming stem from?


As a techie at heart, I entered the industry as a software developer at OpenBet when they were still called Orbis Technology. I heard they were doing online betting at the time and appreciated how it could be a good use of online transaction processing. Ultimately, I stumbled into the gaming industry accidentally in 1999 with Orbis doing sports betting and grew that role over the years.


As Orbis became OpenBet, my role changed from solely being technical to handling integration management, some commercial roles, and contracts. Over the 14 years, I ended up doing just about everything you could imagine. At this point, I had what felt like a perfect combination of experience to start my own software company.


How have systems and software changed over the last two and a half decades?


It's interesting. Tere are a lot of things that are very similar and there's a lot of things that are very different. Computer programmes still work the same way, of course, and they've just become a lot more powerful, scalable, and parallelisable. As such, the things people can do with them tend to be more sophisticated. Tis has happened quite gradually, so the scale of increase has been less noticeable.


On the game side, not much has changed about games and people still think the same way about them in many ways. People still think of the same features meaning that 90 per cent of games do pretty much the same thing. Because that's been a successful formula, people don't


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Max Francis CEO, CTO and Founder Black Cow Technology


want to take risks to try and do something else that might not work. People won't risk their jobs by doing something completely new.


Obviously, the graphics have improved immensely and the speed of the games. Tere are more ideas out there, but generally, as an industry, we have been very, very slow to take up these ideas and innovate. Tat's one of the primary reasons why I established Black Cow actually.


Do you find the general lack of gumption to try something new frustrating or do you understand why industry stakeholders are happy to grab a slice of such a large and lucrative pie?


I do find it frustrating. Tere's a lot more that people could do. I particularly found this to be the case towards the end of my time at OpenBet when the software had become legacy. It was very reliable and used by big lotteries and operators, but it was very hard to innovate and difficult to change. In my role as Partnership Manager, I saw a lot of great ideas and games


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