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With the rise in popularity of Crash Games and the genre’s deceptively simple, yet engaging gameplay, BetGames made its debut on the scene with the launch of Skyward. BetGames CEO Andreas Koeberl has been pleased with the game’s performance so far, and here, he details some of the game’s intricacies, how it stands out in a busy sky full of similar games and where he sees the growth in this currently red hot sector.

Skyward is the latest game from BetGames’ ever-expanding roster of engaging titles. Can you give us an overview of what players and operators can expect from it?

Skyward is our first crash game and we’re really excited about it because it’s just the perfect complement and addition to our growing Instant Games vertical that we launched early last year.

We all know the popularity of the crash sector, we know it’s a hot trend and players love it so we set to work on finding the best way to integrate that into our portfolio and put our stamp on it.

We see a massive overlap in terms of what our players play, so Skyward serves as an amazing acquisition tool for us because it allows us to put game launchers and their thumbnails, into different categories – casino, slots, instant games, crash games – and drive net new players towards BetGames on an operators’ lobby.

That’s amazing for us and that comes naturally for the operators as well as a benefit because they can use the crash game, which is a low-margin game, to upsell to our other BetGames products, which usually comes with a margin of more than double. So it makes a lot of sense for operators as well. This is backed up by the early performance since launch which has been extremely encouraging.

Crash games are among the most popular types of content in today’s markets and there is much competition from suppliers – what sets Skyward apart in a crowded field?

As with all our products, we try to add a unique touch. Skyward is a game where we haven’t reinvented the wheel, as we have done with some of our previous innovative endeavours, but we have stamped our indelible mark in a few areas.

So first off, it’s probably one of the quickest crash games on the market in terms of play duration and how quickly the plane rises throughout the stages, which makes it extremely engaging.

We also combined a few very popular features like Auto Play and Auto Bet into one UI element. It makes the player experience that much slicker. Fewer clicks are immensely important for such a fast-paced game.

But the true USPs are twofold: one of the main differentiators is the bonus engine which is something that the market currently lacks. We give bonuses and extra plays to value players who take risks and play continuously. The crash game category has a big issue in most developing markets where there’s a lot of bonus abuse due to the super quick nature and players betting on 1.1x or 1.01 X to just turn their bonuses into cash.

What we do is give players bonuses based on their gameplay, but instead of just randomly throwing cash at them, we look at the player behaviour and you can reward those that, for example, have a risk profile not cashing out before 2X,3X and have placed a certain number of bets, then they get a reward while bonus abusers don’t benefit.

That’s something that some of our major partners asked us to look into when we did the market research earlier this year and was an important element of the design for them, so, we made sure we incorporated that.

And the last thing that is really exciting is what we refer to as ultimate localisation. We have fully bespoke, branded animations that we can tailor the game with. It’s not just putting a logo on a plane, it’s the entire game itself. Each is unique, can have individual animation per partner, and is developed to an exact design.  We launched one already last week and have several more almost ready to go live in the coming weeks.

Many might not have expected BetGames, with its heritage in live-based titles to expand into this sector – what has driven you to move into this area?

We’re catering to the player – it’s really that simple. BetGames is the go-to gateway between sports and gaming. We are a non-traditional live dealer provider and our player is different from the £50 roulette variety. We help partners convert and nurture recreational punters into casino or better games players. We see this massive overlap within our player profile with rapid play genres like slots and crash, rather than live casino and that overlaps a lot with the slots category, crash games and instant games.

That’s also why we dedicated an entire vertical last year to this topic with a couple of titles out now along with Skyward because players simply demand it. We’re evolving what we do to match the evolution of player taste, moving with the shift in the market.

When you look at what’s going on, this vertical of what we call instant games is something that is booming. We see the key areas our partners focus on and where they invest their marketing, and it’s all about slots, instant games, crash games, et cetera. These are the major growth areas but live casino and live entertainment are still there. We are a live supplier by heart and will always be, but we can’t ignore global market trends and those of our distinct BetGames players and what they want. Again, our mission is to convert sports-savvy players organically. This requires more than one category of games. Twain Sport was one piece of that puzzle, and Skyward is another.

How have you leveraged your expertise in crafting unique and ground-breaking experiences to develop Skyward?

It’s quite interesting how many challenges such a project brings because crash games are deceptively complicated. At first glance, they’re simple, like having an old Atari-style plane going into the air but the core elements, for example, cashing out, can be quite tricky to perfect.

It’s not like a slot that is front-end driven where you basically have your own game. This is a so-called common draw game, so all players play the same session and will see the same result. This makes it quite tricky to implement because you have to think about a player sitting in rural Brazil with a 3G network, and you have to ensure that when they press cash out they get their money and not an error because of a delay caused by the network connection. It’s these kinds of challenges that can be tricky to solve because you cannot just do so via the front end for various reasons.

Ironing this particular issue out saw us benefit greatly from our experience as an engineering organisation.

I think that’s one of the biggest benefits of our BetGames legacy that has helped us to build such a game and to solve its technical challenges – what happens if the player loses the connection for half a second and the plane flies away? Do I lose the game? Do I get my stake back? How do I solve these issues? That was the key thing, and all the creative features and bonus features stemmed from our heritage in developing hugely successful live products, and we leveraged that insight with the development of Skyward.

Is this type of content something we can expect BetGames to explore more thoroughly going forward?

Yes and no! There is a full roster of crash game ideas we have on file, but I wouldn’t say for sure that any of those will definitely see the light of day. We may develop another, but we’ve absolutely got our focus on the instant games vertical that we have been exploring recently and which continues to perform quite well for us.

We’ve also got another non-crash, trademark, unique BetGames title on the drawing board, something that will offer rapid play for low stakes and has never been seen before so we’re excited to bring that to the market too.

Back to crash games though, I’m not sure how many different varieties you can produce without just cannibalising your existing content but titles of a similar, instant, rapid-play nature, certainly. We’ll be able to reveal more nearer the time.

BetGames has proved itself as a supplier of choice for tier-one operators how will your expansion into a wider product base support this?

I think that comes naturally. If you look at what our industry peers are doing, they’re putting big investments into slots, because the market shifts and when the big players go into that direction, that tells you a lot about what’s going on in the market.

We will always try to add our unique touch to everything we do, and we’ll always be able to offer our partners something special that no one else can. Skyward comes with a few unique tweaks that we think the market still lacks. The next instant game we’ll build has also never been seen before so we’re able to position ourselves in such a way that our offering is attractive to the big brands who crave diversity in their lobby to differentiate themselves and provide the choice that players are after. Everything we do is part of our vision to be the go-to gateway between sports and gaming.

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