It was always going to be a busy year for the team at Yggdrasil, that much was clear in January when CasinoBeats travelled to London to get the lowdown on the firm’s new publishing division from CEO Fredrik Elmqvist and head of publishing Björn Krantz.
Since then the company has embarked on a multitude on developments across variety of core strategic areas, from promoting a healthy, safe and sustainable gambling environment, pioneering the use of google cloud and inking many deals alongside igaming development studios.
In this update Krantz assesses the franchising approach, the success of those integrated through GATI and igaming retention strategies with a potential tidal wave of sporting events on the horizon.
CasinoBeats: Earlier this year you offered the keys to the Yggdrasil kingdom with the new publishing arm, how has the new franchising approach been received?
Björn Krantz: It has been overwhelmingly positive, and very rewarding to see how our franchisee partners quickly have understood the business and operational rational. Through the franchisee value proposition, we address our partners desire to achieve a faster, highly scalable, and efficient path to realise business strategies, and unlock revenue growth potential. We manage all those business strategy components through our franchise offering where our disruptive, and standardised GATI technology sit as a centre piece.
CB: When we spoke at the turn the year speed to market and taking aggregation to a completely different level were central goals; has this been achieved?
BK: I can proudly say that we have achieved several of our key deliverables and objectives. The roll out of global franchisee partners has started, and we have an extensive funnel list of prospective franchisees. Our unique and disruptive GATI technology is an integral part of the franchise IP licensing delivery, and the foundation of the decentralised aggregation network. We also call it beyond the traditional aggregation network. We are thrilled about the response from the market, and now its full roll out and execution focus from entire organisation.
CB: What makes GATI so unique, and how is GATI addressing the need for game developers to scale their business operations?
BK: From commercial leadership, and operational excellence perspective, the industry needs a highly scalable and efficient path to realise business strategies. We address all these business echo system needs through our disruptive technology GATI. GATI is a preconfigured, regulation-ready development toolkit, enabling studios and game developers to use a standardised technology solution to develop and distribute games anywhere in the world.
This means our partners can source, build and distribute content and crucially accelerate global reach, finding new ways to increase revenues, all using one standardised interface. GATI is an amazing piece of technology that offers our partners a very efficient commercialisation turnaround time.
CB: How successful have those integrated through GATI been in enabling games to be released quickly over various markets?
BK: GATI has been a revelation for studios looking to expand their reach across global markets. The technology is designed from the ground up to make life as easy as possible for building and porting content and has Yggdrasil’s partner connect that manages all regulatory requirements baked in.
From a Yggdrasil portfolio perspective, GATI enabled games have been rolled out to production across all of our markets, and now our YG Masters partners are finding that adapting existing content to GATI is a very quick, simple and a secure process.
CB: There’s a growing demand for casino content at the moment with a lack of sporting edge, how does this approach aid those aiming to fill the sporting gap?
BK: Our igaming echo system have seen a re-distribution of liquidity over various gaming verticals for sure. Many of our partners do however operate a diversified portfolio offering which can balance out parts of the negative impact from the delayed or cancelled sports calendar.
That we see higher than normal shift of liquidity to online casino segment in back of an impacted sportsbook, I would say was quite expected as you in a business as usual scenario already have a decent conversion of players between the two vertices. Outside of this conversion, I assume virtual sports have seen some uptake as this is an interesting complementary RNG product segment, and a vehicle for keeping players entertained within your network.
I am sure we will see a continued influx of new innovative developments that will allow for clever conversion and cross sell between product domains depending on shift in market dynamics.
CB: With every rise, however, comes an often inevitable fall. How can igaming retain these new players when the wave of sporting action returns?
BK: Our industry is in forefront of innovation, product optimisation, and maximisation of technology to address various player and entertainment needs. Today we have well developed gamification tools that supports our partners to optimise their operations around our portfolio offerings, this to maximise player engagement, loyalty, and entertainment level.
There has for sure been unique opportunities for our segment to build great game brand awareness to a wider segment of players over past few months, and positive that many of those new players will find their way back to many of those games they found exciting and entertaining. Important as always is to make sure we can make a difference every day and be in full control of our strategy.