AUTHENTICITY
The NE philosophy goes back to my days from bet365. Our business foundations are built on philosophy of trying to genuinely help the customer. We do not fake it.
Whenever we are creating something, our concerns are not about easier development route or how low we make the production costs; instead our focus is always on how we can make it connect with users and create the best possible user experience. Does the product connect with the inner sport fan of the user? Can we remove an extra click to offer a better user experience? How can we provide a better engagement to our customers?
We look at everything from a user experience standpoint first. Looking at the size of a mobile display, we asked: how can we improve the functionality of what’s out there?
This process solidified our perspective that it's not just about the sportsbook and casino product. There is a clear need for better engagement and that's when we started looking at going into games development. Initially, our focus was around creating sports themed titles beginning with two of the most popular sports, cricket and football. We weren’t interested in traditional casino games development because there are already several good providers in that space with who have and are creating some amazing content.
IDENTIFYING DISCONNECT
We identified that a casino player finds it difficult to engage with sports betting because it’s very numbers orientated, whilst a sports bettor finds it difficult to connect with casino games because they tend to be heavily gamified with animation and graphics.
We saw an opportunity to bridge these two worlds to create products that have a sports concept at their core but with better UI and easy engagement. That's how the first set of games were created and on the back of their success we have since launched the first regulated jackpot in Africa as well as Pick 6 products and super light virtual leagues.
More recently, we have tried to tie our sports theme with crash games to great effect. We created our first crash game, Defender: Football Crash Game, where players cash out before the opposition team scores a goal. Following this, we launched First Wicket Partnership: Cricket Crash Game, where players must cash out before the first wicket falls.
This is the domain where we are now growing very fast with requests for other sports with major brands to create their themes for crash games.
Whilst every game provider has a crash game nowadays and they all create their own versions, it doesn't mean everything works. As
an industry, we take users for granted in that respect. Just throwing out options isn't going to work. The product needs to be good quality to attract the attention of users.
A UNIQUE APPROACH
When we started creating these titles, they were unlike anything else in the market. They took a long time to produce – it was over a year to get the first one developed and launched.
Since the launch of NE Games last year, these games have been very well received by every operator and aggregator we are partnered with. What that has also done is open another vertical for us as a business. A number of tier one operators have launched content brands for brand awareness and advertising purposes, throwing out news apps in the App Store so they could engage with users at a much lower cost.
But they don't work for the same underlying reason I mentioned before - if the product isn't good, people aren’t going to use it.
This presented us with the opportunity to create a different kind of engagement model for free- to-play content. We now have an amazing product that we have launched with Parimatch and Pix Bet that has gamified the whole experience with users returning daily to play free-to-play games. These games are all sports themed which rather than having the industry standard old looking widgets, look fantastic.
GAMIFICATION MODULE
Gamification is the next big thing we are working on in terms of how you create a gamification layer on top of your whole experience. Ultimately, a user wants to be associated with a brand for a long time and every brand wants a user to be engaged with them for as long as possible.
To get a user to spend more time on your sports betting website, you want them to also spend more time with the brand. And this is where the right balance of gamification and free-to-play content comes in. This quality of brand engagement means that when you notify users, it needn’t always be inorganic suggestions to place bets. Brands need to appreciate the users who are engaged with them rather than trying to sell all the time.
To address this, we have created a gamification module across the platform; so that when users are on the brand’s betting website or non- betting apps, they can collect loyalty points across the board that can then be used to purchase free bets, VIP access, boosted odds, branded merchandise, tickets for events and more.
This gamification module is for brands who want to have a bigger impact. All the big brands out there are crying out for better connectivity and quality, attractive games are at the core of achieving this.
