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Exclusive Q&A with Michael Hudson, CEO and Co-Founder of GameBake

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Reading Time: 12 minutes

 

We have here with us an entrepreneur who started out quite early in gaming.

Michael Hudson, CEO and Co-Founder of GameBake, talks here about a host of topics:

  • His beginnings as a game developer, his quest to develop a ‘fair, transparent, platform agnostic solution” that allows seamless publishing of games across platforms;
  • His instinct of “running away from the light” and looking for “fringe areas”;
  • What game developers can expect from GameBake;
  • And about the gaming industry across the globe.

This is a bit longer than our usual interviews. But it contains nuanced perspectives expressed in straightforward language that the whole industry should look up and take note.

Over to the interview now!

Q. To start off, tell us about your career. Our readers love to hear top entrepreneurs talk about themselves, especially someone who became one at the age of 13!

A. 13 definitely feels like a lifetime ago now! But yes, I started my career in the games industry at 13 although my life as an entrepreneur goes back a little further than that. Since day one, I’ve always tried to make money – some way, somehow, from car washing to selling sweets at school (the demand was there, with only “healthy” options available at lunch times!)

Like they are for many of us, games have always been of keen interest to me, but unlike most, I always wanted to find out what makes a game and how I could make my own. I think it’s those kinds of questions that I’ve always asked that lead me towards teaching myself how to first build websites to host flash games, and then how to actually build the games themselves.

I first started exploring game development with a tool called GameMaker which is still around today, albeit much more developed than when I started with it all those years ago. Eventually I transitioned to working with Flash and building games for websites such as Newgrounds, which eventually led me to the sponsorship/licensing model and how I made my first $200 licensing my first flash game. My next flash game made over $15,000 in fees and that is when I started to take things a little more seriously because big numbers were involved. Considering I had turned down King (yes, the same King that went on to develop the hit we all know and love) I was clearly starting to move towards developing my hobby into a legit business, in a very natural way.

Since then it has been a rollercoaster with ups, downs and many loops, but it has led me to where I am today, with an amazing team (and now, friends), where we can be part of and help build the future of the gaming industry.

Q. How and why did you co-found GameBake? And what does the name signify?

A. GameBake was born out of a genuine business need. As developers, we’ve learned that it’s best to knuckle down and focus on a single product, a single goal that we can all work hard on to achieve great things.

As developers under our previous studio name, we worked on many projects, from hyper-casual games (before that became an industry term) right down to free-to-play titles. This experience was amazing but always positioned us in a similar place. Our publishers wanted the games to be playable everywhere but we only had so much manpower and hours in the day to actually achieve the lofty goals being asked of us. Integrated 3, 4 or 5 SDKs is annoying enough, but having to do that plus integrate the tech of every single platform plus find new services that work on and with these platforms plus making a new specific version for each platform (and all of that with no centralised system to easily and efficiently track everything), well, it wasn’t great, let’s leave it at that.

GameBake was a product of all of this. Our internal struggles and frustrations that led us to seeing a need in the market that, not only we wanted to solve, but many others wanted a solution for, and that is why we pivoted away from a development studio to go all-in with our KILN technology that allows us to open up the whole gaming market to developers globally, no matter how big or small you are.

What does the name signify? Well, we were named Yello at the very start so GameBake was part of our development as we pushed forwards into new markets and started using better technology. GameBake itself doesn’t have a specific meaning behind it, but for us, it describes what we do in one word, which is: baking games with the technology needed for everybody to access new amazing platforms and markets globally.

Q. How exactly does GameBake work? What kind of support can a gaming developer and publisher expect from your company?

A. How the tech works behind the scenes is probably a question more for our amazing CTO, so maybe you’ll find out in the next interview! But the concept is pretty simple really:-

• Upload your APK to GameBake, the very same APK used for uploading to Google Play;
• Check the boxes for the services your game uses; E.g. GameAnalytics, Tenjin, or Firebase, Adjust and so on;
• Check which stores you want to deploy to, e.g. Huawei AppGallery;
• Job done! Our tech (called KILN) takes care of the rest and spits out a compiled version of your game with all the required tech needed to run on the chosen platforms you are looking to distribute to.

Of course, store pages need to be built for each platform and IDs from other services need to be swapped for new IDs from those services, but for the new platforms you go live on. We are working closely with most of the big industry players to try and automate as much of this as possible and we are well on our way to achieving this.

As for what to expect from GameBake, well I would say a fair, transparent, platform agnostic solution that works! If you want to use our tech to make getting to new platforms easier, but want to make partnerships with the platforms yourself (i.e. setup features yourself and so on), that is fine, we are able to facilitate this and will do all we can to provide what you need with who you need. If what you are looking for is a more hands-on approach from us, one where we setup all your games features, run the UA and more then we can also work with you like that as well.

For GameBake, flexibility is key as we see the technology and ecosystem we are building becoming a vital piece of the development puzzle that will enable easy and commercially viable ways to distribute and scale globally.

Q. Changing the status quo of game distribution is not just unglamorous but kind of swimming against the tide too. What motivated you to choose that path?

A. That is a great way of putting it, although I may go a step further and say it’s more like climbing up a waterfall. I have always been interested in the more fringe areas of any industry, especially within gaming. That may be because I can’t help but look at the potential of anything, but it could also be somewhat from necessity – as when launching our own games we never had huge marketing budgets to compete with so I and the team have had to look into areas that were cost effective.

Over the years, what I have found is that everybody always runs towards the light and it’s the ones running away from the light that are called crazy, but if everybody is standing around that light then it very quickly gets blocked. In short – the people running towards the light will find it very hard to find their way towards it. While those running away, and normally that’s in a different direction to everyone else, will normally find themselves in a niche but lucrative area that they can dominate. It’s only once that light starts burning brighter that others pay attention.

This is how I see distribution right now. The bright light is iOS and Google Play on mobile, with many other options, but all faded into the darkness. And now, the bright lights are glowing and the industry is starting to take notice of what is possible outside of the norm. Now it won’t be instantaneous, but we are seeing growth everyday and the more we all work together to open up these platforms and these markets, the greater the industry as a whole – and the more opportunity there will be for everybody globally to enter and become successful.

Q. What are the options available for games developers outside the duopoly of Google Play store and Apple Appstore as publishing platforms? Importantly, what are the attractions for the developers to opt for such off the beaten path destinations?

A. For those developing native games for mobile (Apps, basically) I would suggest looking into the alternative android market. I personally don’t like the word “alternative” as it gives off a vibe of these platforms being “lesser” than Google Play and this frankly isn’t the case, but we need to describe these stores somehow. These stores are low hanging fruit for most people, as if you can compile an APK, which you can, then you can deploy on these stores and the 100s of millions of users that they have.

Now, I’m not saying that this is an easy feat, or an approach that will guarantee success, far from it, but why you wouldn’t secure your brand and IP, and take advantage of these amazing platforms, makes no sense. To me, It’s a no brainer! Often, what we hear from the market is not that developers don’t want to distribute to these stores, but that they’re faced by complexities in being able to achieve this and in making it commercially viable. GameBake is fixing the headache faced by developers by providing an easy route to deploy to these stores, whilst providing the means to be able to leverage the services required in today’s industry to monetise and scale games effectively.

Outside of the App Stores, there are still a wealth of opportunities. In this space, you need to think carefully about the technology you are building your game in, because web distribution generally means HTML5 games, and for many this just isn’t an option. The opportunities on the web are amazing if approached in the right way, but it takes some time to port and for many it just isn’t worth the time and effort commercially.

The same goes for social/instant gaming platforms, such as Facebook, WeChat, Snap and many more. Your games need to be in HTML5 but more importantly, you need to think about how you approach each of these platforms. You can’t just launch a game and expect it to scale, you need to launch it under the platforms features and leverage them to really take advantage of what makes each of these platforms special.

For me, the opportunities are huge but the barrier to entry is also just as big with tons of awkward tech to integrate, porting games being required and the biggest barrier is the lack of services to allow you to properly scale your game but again, that is what we are here for and we are building. If you want to deploy to stores, port to HTML5, explore new markets and leverage your current service partners to do all of this, you can do – with GameBake.

Q. How can games profit from social media platforms like Facebook Gaming?

A. This is something I am asked a lot and the answer is simple because it is no different than a game on the App Store. If your game monetises via Facebook Ads, you can leverage Facebook Audience Network to monetise it, if done via purchases, then you can use the platforms payments system. Nothing drastic needs to change in how you monetise, I mean you don’t need to start asking for donations, because there is no other way.

I guess the real question here is ‘what are the best ways to monetise on social platforms such as Facebook?’. This is a difficult one to provide a rounded answer to that will please everybody but hopefully the below will help:-

• If you are leveraging IAPs then keep in mind that Apple “currently” stops payments being processed on these platforms if playing from an iOS device. We have all seen the recent news stories though so I expect this to change over the next 12 months opening iAPs up across platforms. Until then though, just keep this in mind.
• Hyper-Casual games have an advantage on social platforms as they have such a broad target audience which makes it “simpler” to make these games go viral. That being said, not all gameplay mechanics work and this must be considered when launching on a platform such as Facebook or Snap. Just because a game was a hit in the App Store, it doesn’t mean you can just throw the game as is on social platforms and expect it to work.
• When launching any game on social platforms, just think about how to leverage that platform’s features. For example, Facebook has a tournament mode that allows players to start tournaments that are playable directly from their timeline. With the right setup and design this can be used to get players sharing with friends which can create a viral UA channel to your game. Most social platforms have specific features like this and you need to leverage them to bring users to your game, keep them engaged and coming back and of course, then monetise them.

Q. What can be done to minimize the hurdles of finance and resource that game developers face while optimizing the games for different platforms? How near are we to a software alchemy that makes games publishing-ready for different platforms?

A. Of course I’m going to say that the time is right now – with GameBake! There are no integrations required, meaning access to all supported Android channels via a single upload. We are still working hard to make this even more simple so developers globally can focus on what’s important and that is creating amazing games. Also, HTML5 platforms still have a big barrier to entry for most but again, GameBake is working hard to solve this to provide a way for developers to easily access these platforms and deploy easily to them all.

There is never going to be a way for developers to not put in any work at all. Success comes from hard work and this still rings true when targeting new platforms, be that new app stores opr social platforms, you need to research and find out who the end users are downloading and playing your games on any given platform and then adapt what you do to engage (and of course monetise said users). There isn’t a solution to stop resources being required for game design, monetisation or user acquisition but, how we see it, these are the pieces of the puzzle that studios want to keep control of. It is the deployment that is a pain in the arse mixed with a lack of a real ecosystem, it makes it near impossible to even consider distribution outside of the core stores. This is what we want to and are solving, simplifying and improving the pieces of the puzzle that are needed for studios globally to take advantage of and focus their resources and efforts on creating, managing and scaling amazing games.

Q. How are the games you work with received and played outside the marquee markets of Europe and North America? Any significant development in Asia, Africa, Australia or South America?

A. It’s a hard question to answer as it is so different for every game and you need to tackle each game on a somewhat market by market basis. In general, a game that is enjoyed in the US is likely to be enjoyed in India as well, I mean we are all humans at the end of the day, the difference comes in when trying to find success at scale in specific markets and on specific platforms.

China is probably the best example to use here because the market is huge, but it is notoriously difficult to enter without properly understanding the intricacies of the market itself. By this I mean it isn’t just localising your games text that you need to think about, but how your game looks and plays, how it is distributed to players in the market and how you can monetise it. Markets, like China’s, have restrictions on games and you need to plan how you will tackle all of this to be able to enter.

China is an extreme case, but other markets do need similar considerations when it comes to localisation. But you also need to bear in mind that your distribution strategy for Apple and Google aren’t the number one everywhere. In India, for example, Google Play is big but there are many other platforms that open up 100s of millions of users. Iran is another market with restrictions in place, therefore Google Play does not work there, so working with local stores is your entry into a market of over 70 million. Russia is another market where you need to understand the local platforms and how players play games to really localise a game properly and effectively.

So going back to what I’d said at the start, a great game is a great game no matter where you launch in the world, but making a commercial success of that game in various markets requires some thought, planning and good execution.

Q. Asia perhaps deserves more focus as a gaming market. Which Asian countries do you reckon have the most potential market as games industry markets?

A. I completely agree, Asia is mostly forgotten by western developers and it’s a shame as the potential across the region is massive. China is the world’s biggest gaming market but that is the market everyone talks about so let’s put that to one side as it isn’t an easy nut to crack.

If I were to suggest markets that have the potential for most developers of casual games to grow in the coming months and years, I would look to a market such as Indonesia where the scale you can achieve in that market alone is huge. However, a lot of the time, it just isn’t commercially viable and therefore not thought about, but with the right knowledge and partners you can access more platforms that really open up a market like this and can turn what is a good market for Google Play games into a very strong one for those thinking outside of the box.

South Korea and Japan are both strong markets for specific genres but again, you need to really think about how you approach these markets. In general, Asia as a whole has amazing potential, as well as many other regions globally.

Q. Are tight regulations or lack of clear-cut regulations a bottleneck for growth of gaming outside Europe and North America? We’d love your insight into the role regulations play in the gaming industry’s growth.

A. Regulations always hinder growth, it is the nature of regulations but of course, sometimes they are necessary. China takes it to another level! I can’t even imagine how big that market would be right now if they didn’t have these tight regulations holding it back. I understand the reasons behind why the government has set them in place (although for “Children’s health” isn’t the real reason, in my opinion) but it is holding back the market’s growth which is a big shame.

I do see the need for regulation sometimes though, for example, to stop Apple and Google tightening their grip on the market and forcing us all into paying a huge tax on the games that have been worked on so hard to get them where they are. Therefore regulations can probably help the market grow in certain cases but overall, the less governments get involved in the industry the better for the industry’s growth in the coming years.

Q. And finally, how do you get your hair so beautiful?
A. It’s all natural

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Christos Zoulianitis: How ENJOY is shaping the next generation of iGaming

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Christos Zoulianitis was recently installed as the Chief Commercial Officer of ENJOY, the industry’s newest kid on the block, which is already building a reputation for developing deeply memorable iGaming experiences that resonate with operators and players alike.

We caught up with the former Playson exec to find out how Enjoy aims to differentiate itself with its Slots and Live Game Shows portfolio, and why its experienced and diverse team is well positioned to make a major impact in the global iGaming industry.

 

Christos, what excites you most about joining Enjoy?

The most exciting part of joining ENJOY was the opportunity to build again something new — from the ground up — by combining the team’s extensive and diverse expertise with my own. Together, we have the power to shape fresh formats, blending the best of slot and live game development. It’s incredibly inspiring to be part of this journey and create a proposition even greater than what you’ve done before.

From a top-management perspective, it’s also thrilling to witness the team’s rapid evolution. We move fast, we grow daily — and we thrive on momentum. Every milestone we hit is not just a testament to our pace, but to our purpose. I can say that we are a very strong team that shares the same ambition of building exceptional experiences, and I believe that is the most important factor of our future growth.

 

Talk us through Enjoy content offering, what sets it apart from existing competition within the market?

At Enjoy, we’re focused on one factor above all: quality. Our core principle is simple — quality comes first. We create timeless slot games, but at the same time we are introducing a new experience of live game shows.

We have the market’s knowledge of what players like to play within a game and keep coming back. As I usually say, we focus on the post-entertainment factor, which is the feeling you receive after a game session ends. Because that feeling translates into long-term player loyalty in our games. What truly sets us apart is our team mindset and experience — we know exactly what works and how to do it right.

 

The live dealer space is a very competitive space – how has the company ensured its live game shows are appealing to operators and players?

The reason for starting to develop Live Game Shows is to redefine what live game entertainment can be through the creation of unique, next-gen Live Game Shows. Our Live titles merge the excitement of real-time interaction with the dynamic mechanics mix of slots, roulette, and wheel-based games, offering a hybrid experience that appeals to both traditional and modern players. Stepping into our studio feels like entering an entirely different universe. From the moment you walk onto the set, you’re transported into a world that rivals top-tier TV productions.

Our mission is to make players feel truly inside the game. A good example is the unique zoom-in effect we have implemented into our latest blockbuster Enchanted Forest, which makes the player feel like they are walking inside the forest of this magic studio.  So, whether you’re spinning the vibrant Wonder Wheel, diving into the mystical vibes of Enchanted Forest, or experiencing the luxury of x320 Roulette, each of our game shows offers a unique gameplay that grips the player.

This level of immersion doesn’t happen by accident — it’s the result of meticulous work and passion poured into every single production.

 

What can players expect from the Slots that you’re developing?

We’re bringing together the charm of classic mechanics with the polish of modern execution, delivering gameplay that is both instantly familiar and deeply memorable. Our best-performing titles Hot Fire Coins 2, Fire Express, and 3 Mariachi showcase the brilliance of our team to maximise the quality of the Hold and Win format – visually pleasing with plenty of features to experience.

Early performance data illustrates that these games have not only captured the attention of players across numerous international markets but also set a new standard within iGaming. Our commitment to delivering engaging and memorable gaming experiences has already helped us to gain the trust amongst operators and players alike.

 

Finally, can you provide us with further details on how you intend to shape ENJOY’S commercial growth?

Focusing on high-potential regulated markets is a top priority for us. Countries that we believe will provide ENJOY with the greatest opportunity to make an instant impact include Italy, Greece, Portugal and Brazil, while we’ll also be keeping a very close eye on other regions that embrace iGaming legislation.

Despite our journey being in its infancy, we’ve already secured important distribution deals with respected industry leaders such as Reevo, Digitain, Softswiss, and Slotegrator. For me, this speaks volumes about the supreme quality of our offering, with key industry players identifying the value of our dynamic roadmap. That really excites me and provides the belief that we can take the ENJOY experience to a vast global audience.

Above all else, we have an unwavering commitment to innovation, quality, and long-term relevance on the iGaming global stage. I have no doubt you’ll be hearing a lot more about ENJOY over the coming months!

The post Christos Zoulianitis: How ENJOY is shaping the next generation of iGaming appeared first on European Gaming Industry News.

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HIPTHER Community Voices: Interview with CEO of Media 24 Martins Lasmanis

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From his early days in digital marketing to leading one of the most dynamic affiliate networks in iGaming, Martins Lasmanis brings nearly two decades of hands-on experience and strategic insight to the table. In this edition of Community Voices, Martins reflects on the evolution of the industry, the bold moves that shaped Media 24’s growth, and how the company is embracing AI and a product-first mindset to stay ahead. Dive into his story of resilience, speed, and smart risk-taking — and what it takes to build a future-ready affiliate powerhouse.

 

Can you tell us about your journey into the iGaming industry, how your role and experiences have grown over the years, and what key lessons you’ve learned along the way?

I started in digital marketing about 18 years ago, focusing on SEO. I remember spending my first two weeks just reading everything I could find online. A lot of it turned out to be useless, but it gave me the basics. From there, I worked at a few companies, launched and sold my own digital marketing agency, and later became a freelancer.

In 2016, an affiliate marketer reached out to me through a mutual connection who recommended me based on previous work. I joined his company in 2017 as an employee. That move felt like a risk, but I saw potential.

I spent about four and a half years there. Over time, I started to see big opportunities in markets the company wasn’t willing to explore. Eventually, I decided to leave, sold my shares, and took a break. In May 2022, I joined Media 24.

One key lesson I’ve learned is that long-term consistency often matters more than one brilliant idea. And when you’re scaling fast, being agile and willing to adapt quickly is sometimes more important than being perfect.

 

After 8+ years in iGaming, what are the biggest changes you’ve seen in the industry, and how has Media 24 kept up with them? What key things have helped Media 24 stay strong?

Even though the industry never stops evolving, the fundamentals of affiliate marketing haven’t changed much. What has changed is the pace of Google updates. They are a constant source of stress for many SEO-focused affiliates. They now come one after another and sometimes have a big impact.

And now when AI begins to reshape how people search, affiliates will need to rethink how they attract organic traffic. In some cases, we’ve already seen that AI-driven results take away up to 30% of traffic from organic searches. Its growing impact means we should prepare for fundamental changes coming ahead.

What’s helped us most is staying extremely focused. We ran at a loss for almost two years after starting the company. It is often the reality when you are starting a SEO based business. It was incredibly stressful, we nearly ran out of money for salaries at one point. But we kept going with one plan — to make it work.

Now we have grown to 60+ websites, 300 partners and a team of over 50 people. And we didn’t aim for perfection, we aimed for progress. That speed-first mindset helped us significantly.

 

In a competitive industry like iGaming, looking back, can you think of an idea or plan that felt very risky at first but ended up being a big success for Media 24? What did you learn from that?

One of the riskier moves was our “plant seeds everywhere” strategy. We decided early on to enter almost every market where sports betting was popular. Around 90 GEOs in total. In some cases, the numbers said we shouldn’t bother doing that. But we trusted our instinct.

In that way we were able to quickly identify promising markets, then double down where the data started to make sense. It taught us that data is crucial, but so is intuition. Especially in an industry where emerging markets can surprise you.

It also helped us distribute risk. With presence on so many markets, external factors like Google updates or website blocking had a much smaller impact on the overall business. That made Media 24 much stronger and agile in the long run.

 

Does Media 24 use new technologies like AI? If so, how does using these technologies help the company get stronger or better at what it does?

Definitely. AI-powered tools have already helped us a lot. For example, we noticed a content formatting task that took our managers hours every day. It was repetitive and added up to dozens of lost hours weekly. So, we built an AI-powered algorithm to automate it. Now it takes just minutes, saving our team days and weeks of work each year.

We’re watching AI closely and see a lot of potential. A few months ago, we started developing an AI-first mindset across the team, setting up bi-monthly meetings and workshops to explore how we use these tools and what’s possible. It’s already changing how we work, and we hope to build up on that. The goal is to figure out how we can optimize our work processes and eliminate as many routine, repetitive tasks as possible. We want to free our employees as much time as possible to think, to create, to be proactive, and to create value.

 

If you could give one piece of advice to someone wanting to build a successful company in iGaming today, what would it be?

Focus on building something future-proof. That means strong partnerships, transparency, and a long-term mindset. In affiliate marketing, a lot of your success depends on trust. Both with users and with operators.

Also, don’t wait for everything to be perfect before launching. Start fast, learn fast, and improve as you go. The ability to move quickly is still one of the biggest advantages you can have in this space.

 

What are the main future plans for Media 24, and what kind of impact do you hope the company will have on the iGaming world in the years to come?

Our focus is on becoming a product-driven company. We’re seeing a shift in the industry, many affiliates are building tools and user experiences that go far beyond what was considered enough a few years ago. That’s the direction we’re heading as well.

The new generation of players wants better experiences. We hope Media 24 can play a leading role in creating what the future of affiliate marketing looks like. Agile, technological, and always focused on the user.

The post HIPTHER Community Voices: Interview with CEO of Media 24 Martins Lasmanis appeared first on European Gaming Industry News.

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Crush Test for iGaming Projects: SOFTSWISS on Why High Load Performance Defines Operator Success

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For iGaming operators, success depends not only on content and marketing but on their ability to stay online when it matters most. We spoke with a SOFTSWISS expert, Deputy CTO Denis Romanovski, to understand what’s really at stake during high load events, what mistakes others make, and what architectural decisions allow platforms like the SOFTSWISS Game Aggregator to consistently deliver 99.999% uptime – even at peak moments.

 

When a platform fails under high load, what are the main negative consequences for operators?The fallout hits three fronts at once. First of all, you lose revenue. Every failed bet is a direct GGR gone. In a one-minute outage during peak hours, you could lose tens of thousands of euros before you even spot the issue. Second, frustrated players flood the support team with refund claims and bad reviews. Most of them switch to your competitor. Getting those players back costs far more than keeping them happy in the first place. And third, in the scramble, tech teams try to spin up extra cloud capacity at premium rates or engage pricey third-party consultants. Those crisis-mode costs often hit the usual infrastructure budget for weeks afterwards.

So in short, downtime isn’t just an IT problem – it’s a full-blown business crisis that affects finance, marketing, and customer experience.

 

How does SOFTSWISS prevent those failures? Which patterns are most effective for operating without breaks?

Our resilience comes from layering proven patterns. We run Kubernetes in multiple regions – Europe, Latin America, and South Africa – so player connections go to the nearest point of presence. Databases replicate asynchronously, enabling instant failover if one zone degrades.

We develop containerised microservices, which means that some of our features and tools run in isolated pods. Rolling updates and canary deployments let us push fixes to a tiny slice of traffic first; if any metric goes beyond the threshold, Kubernetes automatically rolls back.

Static assets and game binaries are cached on regional Content Delivery Networks to reduce the load on central servers. Players receive data from the closest edge node with round-trip times of under 100 milliseconds, even on 3G connections. We also have an efficient system for DDoS Defence. Our stable partnership with Cloudflare provides multi-terabit scrubbing. Malicious traffic is cleanly filtered at the network edge, leaving genuine players uninterrupted.

But one more piece is just as crucial as technology: the team behind it. You can invest in the cutting-edge hardware and build the best architecture, but if engineers lack experience working under pressure, reaction times slow down, and players notice. 

SOFTSWISS brings together experienced SREs, database experts, and network architects with deep knowledge of real-world stress situations. This means we don’t just detect issues quickly – we fix them before operators lose trust.

Together, these layers of design and expertise ensure that, no matter what stress tests occur, our platform consistently delivers on its 99.999% uptime promise.

 

From an operator’s standpoint, what scenarios trigger the greatest anxiety during traffic surges – flash promotions, major sporting events, or something else?

Operators worry most about the unknown spikes. Scheduled events are planned for, like a Champions League kickoff or a midnight bonus reset. But unexpected surges, for example, when a progressive jackpot hits 10 million euros or a social-media post goes viral, can triple traffic in hours, if not minutes. These are the moments when lobbies freeze and players see spinning wheels that never load. 

The fear is not theoretical. I think every operator is familiar with this feeling when you see the queue at the support service filling up with complaints. Every frozen second undermines the player trust that operators spent months building. That’s why they need a reliable tech partner with proven protocols for handling traffic spikes and a track record of keeping the software running without downtime.

 

Can you walk us through a real “crash test” you’ve seen: what operators see on their dashboards when systems go down?

I can describe a typical scenario that happens in one form or another quite often. Let’s say it’s a Saturday free spins sale on a new slot, paired with double loyalty points. Traffic can jump from 5,000 to 15,000 concurrent users in ten minutes. On the dashboard, CPU usage rises above 90 per cent, Redis cache miss latency jumps from 5ms to over 50ms, and the error rate exceeds 5 per cent. Players see “502 Bad Gateway” errors or simply blank game tiles.

Behind the scenes, operators struggle to issue refunds, while marketing watches their promotional budget turn into failed KPIs. That kind of slippery slope, where one service slowdown affects another, can turn a simple spike into a full-scale outage.

Another case we had at SOFTSWISS involved a live stream event run by one of our operators. They hadn’t properly forecasted the traffic surge, and the load hit fast. We saw system strain building within minutes – API response times climbing, queues backing up. Our team had to act quickly to rebalance and optimise the infrastructure on the fly by adding resources and redistributing load.

 

Are there any general recommendations or lifehacks operators can use to ensure the stability of their platforms under high load?

Sure – stability is not just about servers and code; it starts with the way people work together and the processes they follow. Regardless of the platform, there are some crucial questions and data points operators should agree on with their provider’s technical account manager before any big launch. 

First, operators need to track traffic dynamics closely – how many players arrive, how many register, and how many stay in play. They should share these forecasts with their provider and flag any risk of actual traffic far exceeding expectations.

The provider, in turn, will map its load models against planned promotions or events. That way, capacity gets reserved in advance instead of scrambling when reality outpaces the plan. At SOFTSWISS, for example, we continuously monitor load on our core components and build in redundancy to absorb traffic spikes.

Operators also need clarity on which SLAs guarantee that extra capacity or failover will be authorised the moment it’s needed. When seconds count, no one should be hunting for the required approvals.

Finally, a new brand or promo campaign must be introduced gradually. Operators can start with low-traffic markets or off-peak windows, verify performance in real‐world conditions, and only then ramp up traffic. This approach will let them avoid unpleasant surprises when the big day arrives.

Nevertheless, high-load incidents do occur. If this happens, blaming is the last thing to think about. However, the tech partner must provide a copy of its post-mortem playbook with root cause analysis, updated runbooks, and clear remediation steps.

Following these checkpoints, operators can trust their tech partner to handle any traffic surge. Potential failures that once threatened to crash the system become routine operations, no matter how intense the load.

The post Crush Test for iGaming Projects: SOFTSWISS on Why High Load Performance Defines Operator Success appeared first on European Gaming Industry News.

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