Following the news that lottery game suppliers Gamevy and Glück Games are to merge, Helen Walton, co-founder of Gamevy, told CasinoBeats the union is “a very natural next step” for the two companies.
Permanently cementing their existing partnership, the two companies have joined forces under the Glück Group name to offer a broad range of more than 140 games to lottery, bingo and casino customers.
Together the two companies already supply operators such as Norsk Tipping, The Health Lottery and Lottomatica, and expect to announce more high-profile partnerships in the coming months.
“We’ve been partners for a while – it was a very natural next step“
Walton, who remains part of the group’s senior management team, said: “We have complementary skills in the companies – and a bunch of very talented people. Together we plan to become a real force to be reckoned in the instant-win and casual games market.
“We’ve been partners for a while – it was a very natural next step.”
Adding that the companies were already closely connected, Walton continued: “We’ve shared a stand together at ICE for two years running, we share customers, we do joint sales… This feels like a continuation of our relationship.”
Walton told CasinoBeats that the merger had been on the cards for some time but the details of the deal needed to be worked out first.
“I think in all honesty we’ve known this was something we were aiming towards for six-to-nine months, but we there were a lot of details to work through,” she said.
“It was a certain ‘yes’ [to a merger] from very early on – but the ‘how’ took a bit longer. It’s exciting to be opening a new chapter in our story.”
The former chairman of Gamevy, Paul Dolman-Darrall will be the CEO of the new company, joined on the senior leadership team by his current co-founders, Walton and Dan Rough, and by the Glück Games managing director Robert Lenzhofer and Glück’s co-founders Arvind Upadhyay and Rafael Razim.
The companies will continue to run studios in London, Newcastle, Bilbao and Berlin with the existing 50 employees, with plans to “grow aggressively over the next few years”.
“We’ve been close colleagues and joint partners for what feels like a very long time,” said Dolman-Darrall. “We know that we have a uniquely talented bunch of designers, developers and marketeers and we believe that good as the success we have seen separately has been, together we will achieve even more. It gives us the ability to innovate more in our product development, serve our existing customers better and reach a whole range of new customers as well.”
“I met Paul and many of the Gamevy team at Pitch ICE in 2015 and just knew that they would be going places” added Lenzhofer.
“The merge of the two entities has already been executed on many operational levels and it’s a great match – on a people level, on a product level, on an office-geography level and even on a customer level, the two companies almost fully complement each other.
“We are on a very exciting ride to shape the future of what we hope will be the creation of the key-supplier in lotto and instant win,” said Lenzhofer.
