Reflecting on Blaze Gaming’s first year of operations, CEO Keith Goddard underlines the importance of Digient Technologies in expediting the business’ growth and blazing a trail with its unique Casino Trading Games.
Could you tell us more about the formation of Blaze Gaming and the gap you’ve identified for a new studio in the slot’s scene?
Absolutely. Blaze Gaming began as a fun project between Johnson Irudayaraj, the CEO and Founder of Digient Technologies based in India, and me. We’ve worked together for many years. He built platforms and technology services for iGaming clients across Asia, mostly running platforms.
Most of those customers asked for games, then they asked for third party games. Johnson ended up with a platform comprising these titles that have been solely built for customers. Blaze Gaming resulted from discussions we had about turning this into a game studio.
You’ve got the designers, you’ve got the dev team, you’ve got nearly 300 people building software for various clients in the iGaming sector, why not take that product and extend its reach globally by creating it as a separate entity backed by Digient?
We then took the products and have spent the last year branding, polishing the website, getting the games ready to go out to third parties and building distribution capabilities so that we can deliver product to customers. That’s how Blaze was born and where we sit today.
What is the nature of the relationship with Digient Technologies? How separate are the two entities? In what ways can and does Blaze tap into the expertise of Digient?
Digient has been around for several years. Johnson is a technologist who built the business and platform. He’s got in the region of 250 to 300 software developers which, depending on the projects that are ongoing, are all working on iGaming projects.
Digient invested the seed funding and provided the portfolio of games, and they’ve also provided all that tech resource. From development through to support infrastructure, we’ve had a good grounding and a good kick-off, if you like, as a new company backed and financed through Digient.
My focus has been putting a team together that can take these games out to market, sell them and create that distribution we need.
You have several existing business interests and a multifaceted career background across several industries including travel and financial trading. What’s enticed you to take up the CEO mantle at Blaze Gaming?
Good question. I am interested by online businesses that can scale so gaming is a natural fit. I think it was a matter of timing more than anything. Johnson and I have worked on a few good projects over the years. He’d identified a space in the market for his products that we took out and I felt it was a good time to get into that expanding, albeit competitive, market.
We also have a portfolio of financial trading games which I’m sure we’ll speak more about. We could bring in a USP of some unique games, a portfolio of existing games and go to market. The excitement for me was really in that potential and seeing where we could go in the current climate.
Despite the relative youth of Blaze Gaming as an established business, there is already a sizeable portfolio comprising slots, draw games, table games and roulette variants, as well as casino trading games. Why has Blaze Gaming opted not to go down the route of specialising in one vertical?
In some ways the answer is in the question! Yes, there are already a lot of games there, as well as number of platforms that Digient have also built for their clients. They’ve built highly successful Rummy and poker platforms.
They built the original platforms for the freemium gaming stuff that you’re seeing in America now with the sweepstakes, the original Chumba Casino platform, which is now an in-house platform, one of the biggest players in the US and the likes of PokerBaazi which is a significant player in the Indian market. So, we’ve got good experience of product.
Our view is that operators want a diverse portfolio of content. Most operators will have a sportsbook, they’ll have casino, and they’ll have table games. Our job is to provide entertaining products for them as part of a package with everybody else. Having a diverse portfolio gives us greater opportunity for placement on those sites. It’s also important for us to move with the trends such as what we’re seeing with crash games.
We’ve got close to 50 games on the site, and we’ve got a lot of games in reserve that we’re still cleaning up and looking to bring to market alongside new developments. It’s exciting times in that respect.
The typical themes one would expect to see – Egypt, fishing, Asian, pirates, jungle – are all present in Blaze Gaming’s slot portfolio. On a gameplay level, is Blaze Gaming differentiating itself through a game design element other than theme, be it art style, math, features and/or mechanics?
That’s a great question. Most of the games we currently have were built in-house and were made to order from the operator customers Digient had. They are what the operators asked for which just so happened to be what they’d seen probably everywhere else.
There is a set of classic themes in the gaming industry. What we are striving to do is look at what we’ve got out there and continually refine, improve and distribute. For example, we have new math models that we’re looking to roll out, cascading casino slot games, our casino trading games.
Every time we do a new release, we want it to be better than the previous one whether that’s better graphics, better animation, better sound. I see it as continually edging our way to being more of a premium product, but these things don’t happen overnight. We will evolve what we’ve got to a higher standard and be adaptable to trends in the market.
If there’s a game type that’s popular in certain jurisdictions, then we need to make sure we’ve got best in breed product in that game category. We’ve got some good people on our commercial side that have recently joined us and give us a lot of experience from their own backgrounds in distributing content globally. We’re always reviewing what works, what doesn’t, and asking our customers if there is anything they’re looking for.
For example, we get asked a lot for personalisation of content and whether we can build certain slots. We’ll then negotiate a few titles that we will build exclusively for certain channels. I think that’s one of the evolutions you’re seeing across the industry. Everybody wants something a little bit exclusive and a little bit different.
Being able to adapt in a cost-effective manner and in good time is quite a challenge. I think that’s the way some of the smart studios are going and those are the processes we’re looking to put in place to repeatedly deliver that level of service to our customers.
Casino Trading Games. What are they, how did the genre come about and how do they work?
In my career in financial markets many years ago a few of the traders received their annual bonuses every year and couldn’t decide where to spend it. I was the tech guy in the company at this time and was asked whether I could build a trading game to have a little tournament betting on currencies. From there it got amazing traction. Lots of people played it and were running it as a daily tournament.
But what struck me was the interest following the subsequent press coverage wasn’t really from the trading community, but the gaming industry. Gaming companies were calling us up and asking for a product like it to attract high net worth individuals they hitherto couldn’t attract to their websites. They identified the games to target a new audience and generate revenue. That was a lightbulb moment for me in seeing the harmony between trading people, their mindset and gambling products.
We built a version of the games for bet365 around four years ago with live trading prices. Unfortunately, shortly before we launched the government changed the rules on betting on live financial products and that project didn’t quite materialise.
We then had a lot of products which we then took back to the studio and asked, what can we do with this? We’ve now revamped it and created them as virtual fantasy games that link the interest you see in crypto currencies in a virtual trading environment with the polish of a casino game – high graphics, animation, fun, entertainment, speed.
It’s an adrenaline fuelled game with 10-15 second games that gives the feel of the city, that trading buzz, alongside the excitement of playing in a casino. That atmosphere is what seems to be capturing people’s imagination in the way we’ve put that together.
There is massive interest in Blaze as a potential partner to integrate with and at the forefront of those discussions are the casino trading games. We’re looking forward to getting the first reskinned versions out and ready to go in the next eight to 10 weeks.
Is there anything else like Casino Trading Games in the industry?
There’s always been things close to it, but they haven’t grasped the entertainment side. There are games within the product portfolio that are just done different to anybody else. The nearest you’ll see is the equivalent of a high-low binary options trading system.
We’re creating games that look like casino games using chips and roulette tables with virtual fantasy prices that simulate markets. Nobody is quite doing it the way we’re doing it, that’s for sure.
What’s Blaze Gaming’s roadmap? What capacity is there to scale up as demand potentially grows?
I think everybody has challenges of scale. You see studios or game development companies with multiple studios. One thing that’s worked in our favour is being partnered with Johnson’s team at Digient. They can scale much more quickly than we could ever do it because they have the experience and strong development teams. They can shuffle resources internally and bring resources in more quickly than we can.
For instance, we have an integrations team. We’ve done around 25 integrations this year, many of which are reverse integrations which means we do all the work! The demand for integrations is massive, but we’ve been able to rapidly increase the team and overcome those hurdles. Whilst it took a couple of months to get the team established, that’s quick in terms of recognising an issue and scaling up to meet that demand.
We have several games in our portfolio that we’re working on. There are three new math models on our slots that we’ve created and we’re now building games out for those. We’ve got clones of some of our existing games with new themes based on our traditional models that have worked successfully. Over the next 12 to 18 months, we are looking to double the size of the inventory that we own at Blaze.
Hopefully, we can create eight to 10 high quality, super innovative games that will be the front runners for Blaze. If you look at all the big studios, they have many good quality big titles that get replaced with the next iteration and their inventory drops back. Getting a good front shop window built and expanded is the next step from a product perspective. We feel we can take our games up two or three more levels to try and compete with the bigger players that are doing it so well.
From a marketing and branding perspective, how is Blaze looking to compete with those bigger industry players?
The budgets are very different, but it’s a B2B business. We know where the targets are. We understand the operational basis of the distribution networks that are very well established. So far, we’ve focused an awful lot on aggregation through platforms and aggregators. The key with this approach is getting those distribution platforms in place, having the right account management, commercial frameworks and bonuses with systems that can support those games.
Ultimately, we want the operator or the aggregator to have value in taking our games. That’s the question that’s fairly asked: why should I take your games over the others? If you’re a small studio charging the prices of the biggest industry suppliers, you’re in the wrong ballpark. We’ll be competitive on the front, and we want to mix that in with good bonuses, promotions and placement offers.
We’ve also struck some significant direct agreements with operators which will be announced over the coming months. If you look at our distribution from when we started at point zero in June 2023, we now have reach in excess of 400 million page visits a month and we can see that doubling this year with the contracts we’ve signed.
We’ve got reach, now what we’ve got to do is account manage that and make sure the product placements work. Commercially we need to follow that up with rotating good product.
From marketing to markets, where is Blaze currently live and licensed and what markets has Blaze pinpointed as potential avenues for commercial success?
We’re not currently licensed. So far, we’ve been live in curacao.com and pre-regulated markets such as Southeast Asian markets where Digient have been building over the years.
However, we do recognise that regulated markets are part of the way forward and that global distribution requires that. In terms of the contracts we’re signing, we’ve got good coverage coming from Latin America. We are about to submit a UKGC licence application and have partnership agreements in place for strong distribution once that licence is in place. That will then be the catalyst to extend our reach into other European licensed jurisdictions.
First, we’ll get the UK then we’ll try and step out through MGA and other licences based on customer demand. I think longer term we must have that regulation in place and compliance across our games to be a player in the industry. We’re aware of this and we’re working on it. From where we started last year, I think we’ve made significant inroads.
The hope is that by Q4 of this year we’ll certainly have a UKGC licence in place and that’ll be the base for us moving forward.