not only technology created within gaming, but developments in other industries that change consumer behaviour and therefore change what our customers expect from us.


One of your early examples of that problem-solving approach was NOVOMATIC's attempt to establish itself in the UK. What did that experience teach you? Te UK was very challenging because it was firmly established around UK companies and products. We entered in 2004 with something completely different. Our product was video-based, had two screens and was around three times more expensive than the average UK product at the time. Tere were barely any video machines in the market. Te games also behaved differently. Tey were random and could have much greater volatility, whereas operators were accustomed to a much more predictable cashbox. When we put machines on trial, operators sometimes wanted to


return them immediately because they would have a week where the machine lost money. Teir reaction was: “I'm not making money with your product.” So we had to change the approach. We effectively said: keep it for six months and don't pay anything. Give the product enough time to find its audience. Eventually it found a niche in London, particularly closer to the City. Younger customers, including bankers,


The driver was always the need to innovate and try to be one step ahead, but then you also have to commercialise that advantage. It doesn't always work in the way you originally expect. Sometimes the technology ends up succeeding in a completely different market from the one you envisaged.


were more willing to experiment. Tey were familiar with video games, they liked multi-game products and they wanted faster games and more choice. In more rural areas it was completely different. Tose markets were much more conservative and adoption took longer. It taught me something important: you cannot simply break the mould overnight. Consumers have habits and you have to respect them. You need to find the angle where something new works, establish it there and then see whether that niche can become mainstream. Sometimes you are


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impatient because you think: why isn't this working? But you have to understand the essence of why it isn't working and determine what can be changed without losing the thing you believed in originally.


Tat sounds like an important distinction. A product failing imme- diately doesn't necessarily mean the idea itself is wrong? Exactly. If something works in another market, theoretically you might think it should work everywhere. But markets have different histories and consumers have different habits. You cannot apply a McDonald's principle and assume everybody suddenly wants the same thing regardless of what they have consumed before, which is why having a very short feedback loop between R&D and operations is so important. If you have a B2C element, you get feedback directly from the consumer. You can understand what is working, what isn't working and why. Ten you iterate.


Was that always what attracted you to technology - the ability to find another solution rather than simply accept the existing model? Te driver was always the need to innovate and try to be one step ahead, but then you also have to commercialise that advantage. It doesn't always work in the way you originally expect. Sometimes the technology ends up succeeding in a completely different market from the one you envisaged. But if you believe something can represent the next step, you have to be persistent. You also have to keep watching how consumer behaviour changes. In the 1980s or 1990s, nobody imagined people would play games


on a tiny device like a mobile phone. It wasn't conceivable. Ten devel- opments outside our industry changed consumer behaviour completely. Today apps drive a huge amount of leisure behaviour and gaming has simply become part of that. At the same time, traditional ways of people interacting and playing together haven't disappeared. I believe they still have a future as well.


When did you first recognise that online gaming was something NOVOMATIC had to participate in?


I was following the internet phenomenon from the early 2000s. Online casinos were appearing and games were beginning to be distributed online. Te question for me was: how can we participate in this as a real land-based legacy business? It was clear we couldn't simply do it with the existing organisation. We had excellent technology people on both the hardware and programming sides, but they had to focus on the core business. Resources naturally follow where the money is being made, and online was still something experimental. We also had another problem: compliance. As an established licensed company operating in many regulated


markets, we couldn't simply do what some early internet companies were doing and operate outside that framework. We couldn't risk existing licences. So we had to find another route.


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