Soft2Bet CEO Uri Poliavich has stated that motivation engineering is a new level of gamification that must be considered when a company enters a new market.
Speaking at SBC Summit Barcelona, Poliavich was asked about Soft2Bet’s recent entry into the Italian market after acquiring a Maltese company with an Italian licence.
The igaming provider plans to launch in Italy in Q1 next year, but the right strategy must be used to avoid ‘outdated and low-quality products’, which the firm aims to achieve by upgrading gamification into ‘motivation engineering’.
Poliavich said: “When it comes to gamification, we see a lot of outdated and low-quality products on the market. And what people call today gamification is actually, literally, it’s something outdated that, for us, has been a default feature for the last six years. So today, I’m going to speak, not about gamification, but about motivation engineering. That’s how we call it internally in Soft2Bet.
“So what we do and what we see on the market, what happens actually on the market recently, is we see a lot of M&As of giants acquiring small startups that they have the right technology, some innovations and that’s how they try to combine them with their outdated platforms.
“When it comes to SoftBet, we’re trying to combine our platform with casual gaming. So we’re combining our existing product – casino and sportsbook – with casual gaming apps that are very well known on the market.”
The CEO noted that when it comes to gamification, Soft2Bet is ‘not participating in the race to the bottom when it comes to higher bonuses, higher deposits’, but is instead after ‘entertaining the players’ and ‘bringing in new technology’ that can be easily certified in different markets.
Entertaining players tie in with customisation and localisation – key aspects of gamification which Poliavich believes are important to establish in every region in which a company has a market presence.
Soft2Bet achieves this by ‘constantly monitoring the trends of casual gaming around the globe’ and using these trends differently in specific locations depending on what the market is telling them – one market may prefer a football manager simulator, while another may prefer a wargame strategy.
Poliavich added that constantly monitoring casual gaming trends is also part of Soft2Bet’s strategy for staying ahead in the gamification space, alongside other aspects such as collaboration with other companies, utilising motivation engineering correctly, as well as PvP markets and skill games combined with real-money gambling.
“We’re collaborating with top-notch companies, with the best companies on the market that actually give us the opportunity to be part of their IPs, be part of their technology, and actually literally combine via API, their unit, which will be converted to HTML, with our gaming products – sportsbook and casino – and create something new that we call ‘motivation engineering’, which is a new level of gamification.”