Connect with us

Interviews

Exclusive Interview: Jonathan Power, Founder and MD of Voxbet

Published

on

Reading Time: 9 minutes

 

European Gaming talks to Jonathan Power, Founder and MD of Voxbet, about the company’s rise to prominence in the sports betting space and making waves in genuine innovation with its latest betting microphone for sportsbooks.

What was your industry background before you started Voxbet as Onionsack in 2006?

My background was in fintech. My co-founders and I had a background in modernising banking tech for the big UK and Irish banks in the 1990s. We did that until the mid-2000s, and I was always very keen to have my own gig. I wanted to enable something that would enable people to conduct value transactions by text message. This was before the smartphone, but we built a platform that could prove it was you who sent the message. We came up with a number of applications for that technology, but the target was fintech and person-to-person payments.

What I knew from my experience with fintech was that the banks won’t touch anything that hasn’t been proven in another industry. We did a few things. We had person-to-person payments, share trading, we offered the buying of concert tickets, but we chose sports betting. You could make a bet by writing what you would write on a betting slip and sending it in a text message. We would read the text message and know who you are. If it was a high-value transaction, we would prove it was you that sent it by calling you back and taking a print of your voice.

I took a punt that the betting industry would try something like that. I went to a trade show in November, and we went live with the Tote in the UK the following June. It was a time when you could get things done. I never left the industry, and even though I say I’m from a fintech background, I’m actually more from a sports betting background now, in terms of years served.

Did yourself and your partners know much about the sports betting space going into it?

I did as a punter, but I didn’t know who to talk to. I took a stand at a trade show and we did well out of it. From there, we did deals with William Hill and Paddy Power, so we built a nice little business out of that. Smartphones then made text betting quite niche quite quickly, but people who bet with us via text in 2006 still do that with us now. We made a massive pivot (in branding terms, more so than technologically) to move into voice betting about a year-and-a-half ago, and we’ve been Voxbet ever since.

With text betting, what would a supplier offer as opposed to an operator saying “text us on this number”?

We would have read the message and understood it. Everybody is uniquely identifiable by their phone number, so we would know it was you, we would know you had the device in your hand, and what it is you wanted. There was about an 80% chance we could read the message and place the bet automatically, before sending you back confirmation, and there was about a 20% chance we wouldn’t understand it with 100% certainty; in which case we needed a call centre agent to bring some human intelligence to the interaction. That’s the platform which is up and running and it’s still used in a number of places, but it’s not what we’re presenting to everyone now. Everything now is all about voice.

When it came to the voice tech, what did your research tell you about what was missing in that space and were many other suppliers offering it at the time?

There were two things we noticed. The first is that tens of billions of dollars are being spent on voice by big tech companies. Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and IBM all have massive products in the voice space and have spent tens of billions acquiring companies in that space. They have made a huge bet on the future of interacting digitally being voice.

The other factor is an awareness that there’s so much content on the sports betting side now. When sports betting sites first went online, it was more or less taking the shop coupon and putting it on a web page; it was that simple. When Google launched in 1997, there were two million websites in the world; there are now two billion. One sports betting site now offers more than two million things you can bet on, but there was still a way of navigating things before Google entered the scene, where you would go through layers and layers of menus. That’s a poor user experience and it’s not an experience for people other than existing gamblers who have had no choice but to use that system. Young people won’t use it like that. If Spotify was laid out the way a sports betting site is laid out, nobody would use it; it would be unusable. People are used to getting what they want everywhere else online.

This wasn’t something sports betting suppliers had tried before, and it actually turned out to be much more difficult than we expected. We thought we could plug into the existing engines like Google and IBM. They work really well to about 90%, but then they apply artificial intelligence which can change what a customer is saying to something that they didn’t say. Sporting parlance is quite unique. If I said to Google that I wanted a £20 treble on Liverpool, Leeds and Coventry, it will say you want £20 travel to those places! That’s actually a benign example and there are some brand-damaging examples. It’s not the sort of thing you could launch with the kind of mistakes those engines can make, so we’ve had to adapt to that and come up with something specific to sport.

How did you go about creating the technology that could iron out those issues you mention?

We knew an awful lot about sports betting language from our text betting days. We started out on the assumption that if you could understand a bet which is expressed in words, you could understand a spoken bet. But as I say, it did turn out to be more of a challenge than we thought it would be.

The way we have fixed that problem is by creating a dictionary where the only thing that dictionary understands is sporting terms, and we recompile that dictionary every hour, based on which events are on. We’re working on the assumption you won’t bet on something today that starts in a week’s time, and the universe of what you’re trying to understand becomes too complex if you look too far ahead. I’d say 99% of our traffic is for events happening soon. If it’s not accessible by voice, it’s still accessible the old way. You can make the problem much smaller if you say people are betting in this space right now, and then you recompile the language to be relevant to sports betting in this moment. If you keep recompiling it, it will then be phenomenally fast and accurate.

Does this work just as well then if I want to bet on a complex Betbuilder as much as a single match?

It’s working on racing at the moment, and it will do anything up to the most complicated place bot in one hit. You can say ‘£5, place bot,’ and call out all your horses. The target is to eventually include Betbuilders. Once we can do that on horse racing, we will know we can do it on other sports as well.

So how many sports can it work for right now and what sports are you planning to expand to?

In English, the rollout will be in three phases. The first is for horse racing, which is ready to go. The second is for football, which we’re working on, and the third phase is everything else.

How significant could this be for operators, in terms of the percentage of bets that could be placed this way?

That’s something we will begin to understand after we launch. We’re working on an integration in Asia, and in the UK, it will launch before Cheltenham. We don’t know yet, but what we do know from our text betting metrics is that the people who want the easiest way of betting are the people who bet a lot. The average user of a betting app might bet 12-15 times per month. The average user of text betting in France for example bets 160 times per month. Simplicity appeals to those who interact a lot with sportsbooks, and they’re very important customers who are currently poorly served by having to do a lot of digging.

Are you particularly looking at younger demographics within the serious bettor demographic?

We’re after two key demographics. The first is more important in value terms rather than volume terms, so for those who know what they want, we want to give them an easier journey. The second cohort is younger people who engage digitally with their voice every day already. They use interfaces like Spotify and TikTok, and have never had to navigate something like a sportsbook, so that’s a key market for us as well.

Would I need to be logged into the app to use the voice technology?

The intention with our bet mic is that you’re inside the app. We give operators a widget that they can put on their homepage. You press and hold the microphone, say what you want and let go. That then brings you to the betslip.

How compatible would that be then with something like Alexa?

Alexa won’t work for this. It was something we looked into. We did demos on it and it looked impressive when it worked, but the problem at the moment is that Amazon will translate what a customer said to Alexa, and it just gives you the transcript. Amazon has to do that without any context of what you said, so it’s actually phenomenally impressive that it comes even close, but most of the time, it doesn’t come close enough. You can get it to work, but it doesn’t work at a high enough level of accuracy. At the moment, I would say ours will work 99% of the time and produce exactly what you said. It becomes much simpler when you have context, but that means you can’t use tools like Siri and Alexa, because they work without context.

How challenging will it be to get across to people that this is a different way to bet from what people are used to? How will you change people’s mindset and make this the first thing they think to do with a betting app?

People of my age learn from younger people. I see my children do something and then I start doing it. It’s partially going to be down to operators to get it across to their customers that there’s an easier way of doing things. When you see a microphone, you tend to know what it’s for. If you see a microphone on the homepage of a sportsbook, you will wonder if you can just speak your bet.

The likes of Waterhouse VC  have invested in your business. What has that investment been used for specifically and are you still looking for further investment?

Industry heavyweights open doors and their evangelism is transformative to us as a company, because people really listen to them. We use the word ‘ubiquity’ 10 times a day, and that’s our target. We know that when the right innovation hits the industry, everybody wants it. That’s what happened with in-play betting, cashout and in-game multiples, and we think this is in the same category. Those investors can change this from being a niche product which a few people think is cool to something that will become ubiquitous. We’re not looking for further investment. We have a trading business with our text betting, and that’s something we will look at, but not right now.

What is their equity in the business?                                                        

A lot of deals like that these days are structured with underlying options. They’ve bought a small piece but they’ve got an option for a bigger piece. I’d advise any innovator to look at offering industry evangelists deals that are structured like that, because it means they’re not penalised for the value they create. They can buy more at the same value as when they joined the business, even when it’s worth significantly more. All of them have put their own money in.

Does their collective ownership come to around 10% or less than that?

I’d say collectively it’s around 10%, but they have options to go nearer to 20-25%.

What do you think really needs to improve in the area of voice technology and how will you take it on a level?

I think the big tech in this space is amazing and I wouldn’t want to be seen to be in any way critical of it, but they’re working without any context. If you use Google’s voice dictation, it’s phenomenally accurate, but it is having to do that without context. You’ve got so many things happening in a sportsbook, and even if you want to ask about events in the next three hours, it’s too much to ask Google to understand that model, because there’s too many terms.

I think the big tech engines aren’t sufficiently adaptable to customer-facing scenarios in a B2B sense, but the business knows the context. I could be at an insurance company, and I know when someone sends me a voicenote over WhatsApp, they’re going to be talking about making a claim or wanting a renewal. The amount of language that’s relevant in that scenario is a very small fraction of what they’re able to understand, but because they’re open to understanding everything, they get more wrong. I think the ability to configure their platforms for a very narrow context is what makes us different.

How many operators have you partnered with and how many will you go live with at Cheltenham?

We have one media company which we will go live with, and they work with 10 UK bookmakers, so there will be bets placed with this at up to 10 major UK bookmakers.

Going forward, which markets will you focus on?

English is a priority. Everybody wants to focus on the US, but for us, we are also focusing on the Chinese language. We’ve got our platform working for the Asian market, so if we can do that, we can do anything. English will be the priority, but our biggest customer is PMU in French, which is easy for us to do. We’re undecided but we will take the opportunities where they come. A new language requirement will take about a month for us to get it working.

Do you have a target for the number of sites you want to be live with in the next few years?

We want to be live on at least 100 sites in three years and want to be on almost every site within five years.

How will the technology evolve over the next few years to allow that to happen?

The voice technology that’s out there is good enough. It will really depend on whether operators want to offer a chat-style user interface, where a customer can say: ‘I want to bet and I fancy Liverpool to beat Spurs tonight. What will the price be if put 20 quid on that?’ That’s not our approach. We just want customers to say: ‘£20, Liverpool to win.’

The whole area of what’s happening with ChatGPT and AI could change what user experiences people want and how they want to engage. I think people want to engage with technology as though it’s technology and want to engage with people naturally. It would be sad if people wanted to engage with technology as though it’s a person, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.

Continue Reading
Advertisement

Baltics

HIPTHER Community Voices: Interview with the CEO and co-founder of Nordcurrent Victoria Trofimova

Published

on

hipther-community-voices:-interview-with-the-ceo-and-co-founder-of-nordcurrent-victoria-trofimova
Reading Time: 4 minutes

 

In this edition of HIPTHER Community Voices, we talk with Victoria Trofimova, the CEO and co-founder of Nordcurrent, the biggest game studio to come out of Lithuania and the Baltics. Since starting the company in 2002, Victoria has led Nordcurrent from a small team to an international gaming success story — all without external funding.

She shares how key decisions like focusing on mobile games, building a diverse team, and staying true to their creative vision helped shape Nordcurrent’s growth. We also dive into how she’s helping put the Baltics on the global gaming map, supporting young talent, and what advice she has for the next generation of women leaders in tech.

 

Nordcurrent has grown into a Baltic powerhouse since its  founding in 2002. What were some of the pivotal moments that  shaped the studio’s identity and success—especially as a bootstrapped company?

One key moment was our decision to focus fully on mobile gaming early on. That shift, around 2010, allowed us to scale globally with titles like Cooking Fever, which became a long-term success story. Another pivotal step was building and retaining in-house capabilities, from development to marketing, while staying self-funded. Being bootstrapped taught us discipline, resilience, and how to make bold yet thoughtful decisions without external pressure.

 

You’ve scaled a 360-person team across multiple countries.  What have been the biggest challenges—and advantages—of  growing Nordcurrent without external funding?

The biggest challenge has been growth pacing. We had to build sustainably, without shortcuts. But that’s also been our advantage; we’ve kept creative control, built long-term trust with our team, and stayed focused on profitability and product quality. It’s a different rhythm, one that favors deep thinking over hype.

 

Diversity in gaming is still lagging behind. What concrete steps has Nordcurrent taken to drive inclusion, and how do you embed this into studio culture, hiring, and leadership?

We don’t overcomplicate it, we hire the best people who want to build great games with us. We don’t separate or label by gender, background, or title. If someone brings talent, drive, and a collaborative mindset, they belong here. That approach has naturally led to a diverse team, including strong female leadership across departments. We focus on creating an environment where everyone is treated equally, trusted, and heard.

 

You’ve spoken about attracting global talent to Lithuania and the Baltics. What makes the region appealing—and what misconceptions do you often have to overcome when recruiting internationally?

The Baltics offer a great work-life balance, strong tech ecosystems, and a tight-knit creative scene. But we still need to overcome outdated perceptions; for example, that it’s cold, isolated, or lacking opportunity. The truth is, Vilnius and other cities here are dynamic and are increasingly being recognized for innovation.

 

In such a saturated gaming market, how does Nordcurrent approach innovation and stay relevant without falling into trend-chasing?

We listen deeply. To players, to data, and to our instincts. With over two decades of experience, we’ve built a rich internal library of what works, what lasts, and what connects. Innovation for us isn’t about reinventing the wheel every time. It’s about layering insight, emotion, and cultural nuance onto strong foundations. We don’t chase trends, we ask how a game fits into people’s lives. That’s why titles like Airplane Chefs resonate. They’re familiar yet fresh, culturally rich but globally accessible. Years of learning has given us the confidence to trust our gut and the clarity to know when to try something bold.

 

From mobile hits to console and PC publishing—how has your portfolio strategy evolved, and how do you decide what kinds of games to invest in today?

Our mobile success gave us the freedom to diversify. With Nordcurrent Labs, we now publish PC and console games that align with our values: original IP, strong storytelling, and long-tail potential. We look for teams with vision and grit, whether it’s cozy games or narrative-rich adventures.

 

You recently acquired River End Games and the Cinemaware catalog. What’s the strategic thinking behind those moves, and what can players expect from these legacy properties going Forward?

River End Games brings deep narrative talent and AAA craftsmanship, which complements our publishing ambitions. With Cinemaware, we’re reimagining classics for a new generation. These acquisitions aren’t about nostalgia only, they’re about unlocking untapped creative value in ways that feel both respectful and bold.

 

How are you helping to nurture the next generation of game developers in the Baltics, and what role do you think studios should play in education or early talent development?

We take this responsibility seriously. As the largest Lithuania-born game developer, we feel a strong duty to help grow the industry, not just our studio. We actively collaborate with the Lithuanian Game Developers Association, support local game jams, and organize major meetups that bring the community together. Our goal is to make the gaming industry more visible, more accessible, and more appealing, especially to young people who may not yet see it as a real career path.

It’s not just about hiring talent, it’s about helping to create it. We believe studios should take an active role in popularizing the industry, opening doors, and building a future where game development is seen as a creative and respected profession.

 

You’re leading a company that’s rooted in Eastern Europe but competing on a global stage. How do you balance local values with global ambitions?

We don’t see it as a conflict. Our roots give us authenticity and resilience, and these are qualities that resonate globally. We build games that are grounded in strong craft and cultural richness but are universally relatable. Staying true to who we are has been our best strategy for going global.

 

And finally—what advice would you give to aspiring women leaders in tech and gaming who want to break into this industry and rise through the ranks?

Own your voice. You don’t need to fit a mold to lead. Surround yourself with people who challenge and support you. And remember, leadership isn’t just about a title, it’s about taking responsibility, lifting others, and staying curious. Tech and gaming need your perspective, and there’s room for you at the table.

The post HIPTHER Community Voices: Interview with the CEO and co-founder of Nordcurrent Victoria Trofimova appeared first on European Gaming Industry News.

Continue Reading

Interviews

Portrait of a Fraudster Then and Now: How Scammers’ Habits and Tactics Are Changing

Published

on

portrait-of-a-fraudster-then-and-now:-how-scammers’-habits-and-tactics-are-changing
Reading Time: 4 minutes

 

Fraud in the iGaming sector is no longer the work of lone opportunists. Today’s scammers operate in well-organized, tech-savvy networks – quietly exploiting systems that weren’t built to catch them. And as the digital economy grows, so too does the complexity of fraud schemes targeting gaming operators.

Amid this evolving threat landscape, Frogo has emerged as a  company redefining how fraud prevention should work. We spoke with Volodymyr Todurov, CEO at Frogo, to get an inside look at how fraudsters are changing their tactics – and what operators can do to stay ahead.

 

Fraudsters evolve fast – how does your system stay one step ahead without overwhelming teams with false alarms?

Absolutely, the landscape of fraud is constantly shifting and staying ahead requires more than static rules. At Frogo, we’ve developed a dynamic system that adapts in real-time to user behavior and transaction contexts. Our platform learns from both fraudulent and legitimate activities, enabling it to distinguish between the two more effectively. This approach reduces false positives and ensures that our clients’ teams can focus on genuine threats without being bogged down by unnecessary alerts.

 

Can you walk us through a real-world case where your platform uncovered a fraud scheme traditional tools missed?

Absolutely. One notable case involved a large-scale bot attack targeting SMS-based fraud vectors. Initially, our standard device ID-based defenses helped neutralize the first wave of the attack. However, the adversaries quickly adapted, altering their emulation tactics to bypass traditional checks. At that point, conventional methods were no longer sufficient to detect the evolving fraud.

We responded by implementing a dynamic anomaly detection framework. This involved redefining detection signals in real-time using IP intelligence and deep device fingerprint attributes – areas where our proprietary data collection algorithms provided a significant edge. By anchoring detection logic to more granular and resilient signals, we were able to recalibrate thresholds dynamically, ensuring legitimate users weren’t impacted.

The results were decisive: bot attack efficiency dropped sharply from over 80% to just 3.5%.

 

What’s something about fraud detection that most businesses get wrong? And how does Frogo challenge that?

A common pitfall we see is operational rigidity – many businesses rely on static rules and general-purpose triggers that result in high false positive rates. This not only burdens anti-fraud teams with unnecessary manual reviews but also degrades the experience for legitimate users, especially loyal or VIP customers.

For example, it’s typical to see blanket rules like “manually verify all payouts over X euros.” While that may seem prudent, in reality it’s inefficient. It overlooks low-value, high-frequency fraud – such as bonus abuse – and disproportionately flags legitimate high-value players.

At Frogo, we take a different approach. Our system adapts rules dynamically based on customer behavior and segmentation. A trusted VIP user with a long-standing reputation shouldn’t be reviewed multiple times a day. But if a wave of new €5 accounts starts exhibiting bonus-hunting behavior, they should run immediate scrutiny – regardless of transaction size.

By aligning detection logic with behavioral context and player reputation, we reduce noise, increase fraud catch rates, and protect real users from unnecessary friction.

 

How does Frogo automate risk logic without sacrificing the flexibility businesses need to reflect their unique policies and traffic patterns?

At Frogo, we don’t see automation and customization as opposing forces – they operate in different dimensions. Our focus is on automating the customization of risk and scoring policies in a way that respects each client’s specific risk appetite and user behavior.

We achieve this through dynamic triggers. Rather than hardcoding arbitrary rules – like “five failed top-ups per minute equals fraud” – we apply adaptive scoring thresholds that align with real-world usage patterns.. For example, our system might detect that, for a certain payment method and user segment, more than 1.3 failed top-ups per minute is statistically anomalous – because it exceeds the 98th percentile of historical behavior.

But that same trigger adjusts automatically. If the next day a payment provider experiences a technical issue and normal users start retrying more often, the threshold might shift to 2.7. What was anomalous yesterday may no longer be today – and our system adapts accordingly to reflect evolving traffic patterns.

As a result: the clients retain full control over their risk strategy, while Frogo ensures their policies scale efficiently, adapt in real time, and minimize false positives – even in volatile traffic conditions.

 

Beyond detection – how does Frogo help companies investigate and understand fraud at a strategic level?

Detection is just the beginning. Frogo’s graph-based forensic tools and AI models provide a comprehensive view of the relationships between accounts, transactions and behaviors. This allows companies to identify patterns and vulnerabilities that might not be apparent through traditional analysis. Our analytics layer offers insights into trends and forecasts, enabling businesses to understand the broader context of fraudulent activities and make informed strategic decisions to mitigate future risks.

Fraud might be getting smarter, but so are the solutions built to fight it. Platforms like Frogo are helping operators move beyond reactive security measures and into a space of strategic, data-informed defense. In an industry where trust is everything, that shift might just be the difference between staying one step ahead – or falling behind.



Disclaimer:
Frogo’s fraud prevention solutions are developed in full compliance with applicable data protection laws, including GDPR. All behavioural analysis is performed on anonymised or aggregated data, with full transparency and control provided to our clients.

The post Portrait of a Fraudster Then and Now: How Scammers’ Habits and Tactics Are Changing appeared first on European Gaming Industry News.

Continue Reading

Interviews

Inside the Matrix: A Conversation with EveryMatrix Founders on Europe, Expansion, and Staying Hands-On

Published

on

inside-the-matrix:-a-conversation-with-everymatrix-founders-on-europe,-expansion,-and-staying-hands-on
Reading Time: 4 minutes

 

By Maria Emma Arnidou, Event Marketing Director at HIPTHER, for the European Gaming Media

During the recent EveryMatrix Media Day at the company’s opening of their new London office, Co-Founders Ebbe Groes (CEO) and Stian Hornsletten sat down with press to share key insights into their strategic vision. In this exclusive Q&A, we explore their views on the European Market, the evolution of EveryMatrix’s business model, leadership philosophy, and the company’s experience in the ever-evolving U.S. market.

Europe is filled with local heroes. It’s far more fragmented than most people think.

 

You discussed emerging markets in your presentation. What about Europe – is it considered saturated, or are there still areas of growth?

Ebbe Groes: I really don’t think Europe is saturated at all. In fact, big parts of it are still underdeveloped. Take France for example, it doesn’t allow online casino. Germany has effectively banned it. That’s two of Europe’s three largest economies where casino is either outlawed or nearly impossible. So yes, there is still plenty of room for growth.

Stian Hornsletten: And the market is getting more concentrated around a few bigger players, but even then, it’s not as centralized as in the U.S.

Ebbe Groes: Exactly. Europe is filled with local heroes. You won’t find many players dominating across the board. Kindred, Betsson – they’re strong, but when you go country by country and look at market share, the picture is very fragmented. Even with the economies of scale in marketing – say you sponsor a Premier League team – you’re still not getting the full return unless you’re present across multiple markets. That’s what makes Europe so different from the U.S., where a few big players hold all the cards.

We started with a sportsbook. Now we’re building an ecosystem.

 

EveryMatrix today operates across multiple verticals with a deeply diversified portfolio. Was this the vision from the start, or did it evolve as the company grew?

Stian Hornsletten: The vision definitely evolved quickly as we grew. We started with OddsMatrix, a B2B sportsbook product that was meant to be an off-the-shelf, managed solution – something that didn’t exist back then. Within a year, we had already expanded into turnkey and PAM solutions. By 2010–2011, we had launched the CasinoEngine and started specializing in product verticals.

We’ve always been very innovation-driven. We keep developing new products – some of which are still under wraps – and R&D remains one of the most exciting parts of what we do. Today, most of our top 10 clients are turnkey. While we still offer standalone modules, our growth has come from cross-vertical synergy.

 

Despite this scale and complexity, you both remain deeply involved in the company’s day-to-day operations. How do you manage to stay on top of everything across products, people, and processes?

Ebbe Groes: It helps that we’ve been here from the start. I wouldn’t want to be hired into this role now and try to learn everything from scratch – but I’ve had 18 years to absorb it all. We’ve built the company in a way that each vertical operates almost like its own business. For example, the sports division has its own CTO, product team, trading team, and even its own support function. That independence gives us breathing room.

It allows me to focus on high-level strategy, like acquisitions – take FSB, for instance. That required a lot of focus at the start, but eventually it will transition into the core business and require less direct involvement.

Stian Hornsletten: Over the years, we’ve also developed strong planning, reporting, and KPI structures across the business. That consistency makes it easier to monitor everything and integrate new divisions. Whether we open a new office or onboard a new team, we already have the systems in place to support them.

Ebbe Groes: And the same goes for finance and HR. When we opened the London office, the HR team already knew how to handle it – we’d opened three the year before. That kind of maturity allows us to move fast without creating chaos.

“In Europe we have 150 competitors in content; in the U.S., maybe 10.”

 

And what about the U.S. – a market many see as the holy grail of iGaming? What’s your current position there?

Ebbe Groes: To be honest, the U.S. was a tough lesson. We entered hoping to provide a full turnkey solution, but the market didn’t evolve the way we expected. Many well-funded B2C operators pulled out, and that left little demand for companies like us to offer the full stack. We pivoted to focus on one thing: our own gaming content.

Stian Hornsletten: We’re now live in four out of five regulated U.S. states for our own content, and we have agreements with all the major operators. Some new games from SlotMatrix are set to launch by summer, and they’ve already shown strong performance elsewhere – which gives us hope. If we manage to capture even 1–2% market share with our own content, that would already be meaningful.

But it’s been a long and costly process. Every state has its own regulatory requirements, separate hosting, and certification needs. And if one state’s not ready, operators won’t promote your games nationally. It’s frustrating, but it also reduces competition. In Europe we have 150 competitors in content; in the U.S., maybe 10. So if we can endure, there’s long-term potential.

The post Inside the Matrix: A Conversation with EveryMatrix Founders on Europe, Expansion, and Staying Hands-On appeared first on European Gaming Industry News.

Continue Reading

Trending