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OPEN GAMING ARCHITECTURE BLACK COW TECHNOLOGY
just get dropped just because it was too hard to change, whether it was making games pay out right to left or wilds working in a different way on a Tuesday or whatever it was. It was just too hard to innovate and that frustrated me.
It's one of the reasons that led to me thinking there's just got to be a better way of doing this. Tere needs to be a more modern platform built from scratch that can handle that. It still frustrates me how people think about what's possible yesterday and today and not so much about tomorrow. I don't blame people for not taking those risks all the time, putting their job on the line and saying, yeah, let's do something completely different. But it's lovely when people do.
It's great when someone at the right level within a company is brought in to make a difference and says you're going to have to trust me here. Let's do things differently. We're going to go with these guys and we're going to go down this path.
When establishing Black Cow Technology back in 2013, did you fear the business model could fail?
I had an inaugural customer in Geco Gaming who wanted an RGS. I offered to build them an RGS as a flexible system they could then take over. I walked away with the intellectual property of that after a year, whilst they had a licence to the system and can innovate on it. From this perspective, I knew when starting up that the business would work.
But there's a reason why, when people reflect about starting businesses, they conclude that it's only because they were so naive, they were able to do it. It was 10 times more complicated than I thought it would be but we managed to do it.
Black Cow Technology's hero product is Open Gaming Architecture, or OGA. What is it, and how is it different?
Te Open Gaming Architecture is a remote gaming server. It's the part which securely generates game results and settles them with a wallet and keeps a secure record of every transaction, from the details of every hand of Blackjack to every spin of a slot. As such, RGS systems are very difficult to design so that they're flexible enough to model any kind of game without restrictions and limitations.
What's different about OGA is that it supports any kind of single player game, any kind of feature and any type of game. Slots, instants, table games, pachi -slots, Keno, reactors, they're all supported by the same architecture with the same game engine development kit. From a fully
P110 WIRE / PULSE / INSIGHT / REPORTS
“I had an inaugural customer in Geco Gaming who wanted an RGS. I offered to build them an RGS as a flexible system they could then take over. I walked away with the intellectual property of that after a year, whilst they had a licence to the system and can innovate on it. From this perspective, I knew when starting up that the business would work.”
featured craps game to a highly complex multi- level slot game with player trails over multiple games and days, they're all supported by the same OGA platform.
Our unique selling point is our game development kit. Te game development kit is a code kit for developers to use that allows them to easily build game engines that support any kind of game, particularly slots. Tere's a lot of very rich functionality around building slots that enables ways wins, scatter wins, line wins and what have you. Tere's a video I made where I create a working game engine from scratch, literally from a blank text editor, in 15 minutes. It's somewhat of a gimmick, but for anyone with a technical head on will understand that the game development kit approach is what makes OGA unique.
I don't think there's another system out there with a game development kit. For instance, take side bets. With OGA, any side bet can be added to a game. It can be an existing game, which knows nothing about side bets. Using our game development kit you can add your own side bet onto an existing blackjack game, or even a slot. Te functionality is supported for any game type and feature under the licensee’s control. Tey can develop it themselves; they can have their partners develop it, or they can have us develop it. Supreme flexibility is what it's all about and the capability to model any kind of game.
Have you ever thought about using that gaming capability to establish a studio?
It's a different skill entirely. We get asked that question a lot - why don't you host your own system? It's the same reason that we don't also open a florist shop! It's a different thing, a different kind of business with a different set of risks. We are good at one thing, and we work very hard to design awesome back-end systems for other people to build games. We're not mathematicians, we're not front-end designers, we're not artists, we're not game product people, we are back-end software platform engineers.
How have OGA's technical capabilities grown over the years?
When we first engineered OGA for Geco Gaming, they were a relatively small operator that's now part of Playtech. We then had to firm up the architecture as it started being heavily used. For example, DraftKings use OGA as their online casino in the US, so it now handles billions of bets, literally. We had to do some work on its scalability and its reliability. We didn't have to change the architecture. DraftKings got our vision and they understood how it would give them the power to build their own games. Te
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