Pulse
OPEN GAMING ARCHITECTURE BLACK COW TECHNOLOGY
Playzido and in the process gained a greater understanding of how our architecture works in practice. Funnily enough, as a software company, we don't get involved in the running of our software. It was interesting to closely work with Playzido, understanding how that works, what works well, and what doesn't work so well. Tey produced a lot of games and integrations with that architecture and were successful.
Last year, they were acquired by Light & Wonder, so they are now their internal game aggregation platform. Now that platform is being scaled out to many more data centres in the US and Canada. It was a good commercial and operational deal. It did a lot of work to the software and battle-hardened it in a sense. It also proved the vision. Tey built well over 100 games in three years and 10 or so integrations. Also working with large operators like DraftKings has helped a lot, giving them the independence to do what they wanted to do with a game platform with our platform sitting there doing that for them.
Do you prefer being a close partner to a smaller number of clients?
We get on best being a close partner to a few big customers. It takes a while for any supplier and customer to work out how best to work together. What we do is concentrate on building software platform capabilities so that our partners, our licensees, can build their own features on top of those capabilities. Tat way they don't have to share their IP with anyone else. If they've got a feature that they've worked hard to develop for a great idea, and we implement that on the platform that's not good for them. Tat loses their competitive advantage. So, our approach is to build a capability in the software platform that allows them to build their own software, their own game engine, their own features, their own side bets, their own back office, whatever that might be.
How have customer demands of an RGS changed?
People have trouble understanding the capabilities that OGA gives them because there's a lot of very bad RGS systems out there. Te biggest objection we hear to our sales pitch, is 'we know someone who's got an RGS for £50,000. Why would I pay you X amount when I can get an RGS for £50,000?’ Well, for the same reason that you can get a Mercedes for £80,000 or you can get an Old Ford Escort for £500. Not all RGS are equal. It's difficult to make people understand how OGA is different because people are used to very poor and inflexible RGS systems.
A lot of our biggest competition is people building their own RGS and sometimes sales relationships end with the prospect saying they're going to build their own. Genuinely, best of luck! It's orders of magnitude more
P112 WIRE / PULSE / INSIGHT / REPORTS
The biggest objection we hear to our sales pitch, is 'we know someone who's got an RGS for £50,000. Why would I pay you X amount when I can get an RGS for £50,000?’ Well, for the same reason that you can get a Mercedes for £80,000 or you can get an Old Ford Escort for £500. Not all RGS are equal. It's difficult to make people understand how OGA is different because people are used to very poor and inflexible RGS systems.
complicated than you would think, even if you know what you’re doing. I know this because we knew what we were doing, and it was much more complicated than we thought. Technology is massively underestimated because its ease of use belies its complexity.
Whilst technology has advanced, are software systems and solution architecture as well designed and thought through as when you started out at Orbis?
Tey're more sophisticated now for sure. Tey use better technology and are better designed than they were, but I think the gaming industry technically lags behind other industries in what it does and what it can do because it doesn't innovate fast. Tere's a lot more open-source software available out there, which are industry- grade open-source platforms, whereas you used to have to license something like WebSphere or Oracle, now you can use PostgreSQL for free and it's good enough. Whilst the technology is much better and there are RGS solutions out there, they tend to be built for a particular function without thought to the flexibility required to model any kind of game.
Tat's where systems still fall. Tere are constraints on people to get this thing out of the door as fast as possible. Te mindset is solving today's problem, not tomorrow's problem. And there's some correctness to that kind of thought in avoiding early optimisation. If you have sufficient knowledge about what games tend to do, what people tend to do with them and the pitfalls people fall into when building systems, you can build a good set of capabilities for a system that people will be able to innovate on. Tis is the challenging position most people are in. Tey lack perspective to understand that's what they've got to do to get ahead. So, it's not the technology so much preventing them - it's their understanding of the things they're probably going to be asked to do the day after tomorrow on the system.
Geographically, where are the future growth areas for Black Cow Technology?
I think the US is in a strange place right now. It's
all about sportsbook over there and it's even harder to sell the vision to them of what's possible if you take control of your own gaming system with this architecture, innovate, and have your own games and features that no one else has. Tat's too much of a leap for them now because they're very focused on paying back some of the marketing money they've spent. I think there's a lot of opportunity still in Europe. Canada is an interesting growth area. We're doing some good work over there, but it tends to be a bit slow because they're all government departments, essentially, but they can innovate. Tey've got a good spirit of innovation and that's working well. Ten you have the Far East, of course. Tat's still a very untapped market and something we'd like to get more involved in.
What’s next in the development of OGA?
Our exciting big project is our multiplayer server. We are building the multiplayer equivalent of OGA. We've got a multiplayer framework now which will support any kind of transactional multiplayer game which is cool and exciting. We've built a multiplayer roulette and a multiplayer baccarat so far, but it can support any kind of multiplayer game, whether that's a timed draw or a turn-based game. We've also just started work on multiplayer slots as well using that same architecture. Tose are going to be multiplayer community bonus round slots. Tis is a nice new way of developing on what we call asynchronous architecture - things just happening when they happen: event-driven programming, essentially. Tere are a couple of multiplayer servers around, but as more multiplayer games start to be produced people will start to think of all the extra things they can do with multiplayer games.
Tere's a whole bunch of stuff out there that people haven't even thought of yet with multiplayer games. I thought a nice idea would be something along the lines of a 100-hand slot. We have 100-video poker, why not have a 100- hand slot where players share a big syndicate? I'm sure there are myriad ideas that people will only start thinking of once they have their hands on this architecture. And once there's a few products out there working and then people start thinking, hey, how about that, but with this? Or emulating what goes on in a land-based casino. 10 people sitting around with a bunch of slots all connected to each other and sharing each other's prizes and what have you.
Multiplayer servers are the future. Tey are likely going to be our future growth area and it’s certainly our exciting technical development right now. Ultimately, that's going to also allow us to have a much more scalable system. I think that architecture could probably also support single player games as well. So, you can have clients firing off more and faster requests to the server and playing more games, offering more single player gameplay as well as multiplayer gameplay on that architecture. It's exciting stuff.
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