With the customer in mind

What impact has Betgames.TV seen on live games, both in general and for its own products as a result of the pandemic?

A lot of our customers are sports bettors rather than casino players. Sports bettors tended not to have much activity during lockdown so we saw our clients getting a lot more interaction with their sports betting clients moving to our product, if they weren't already on it. This meant we got a lot of traction from existing clients who were focused on moving their sports bettors to playing our games and we got a lot of clients who understood that our product really assisted in keeping their sports bettors engaged. We signed up a lot of new clients with that in mind.

We have seen live-dealer, in the traditional format, flourish during the pandemic. Our revenues haven't suffered as such by people who are used to playing our games migrating to a traditional live-dealer type product. In fact, we've seen live-dealer products added to some sportsbooks for the first time due to specific regulation allowing it, such as in South Africa. Of course, players were then able to trial theirproduct but we saw a lot of them come back to us because they were used to our format and games, and liked the fixed-odds outcome on our product.

Operators have had to scramble to adapt to survive with ongoing lockdowns and the suspension of live sport. What have been your key learnings this year in terms of the products players are looking for?

Our key learnings have been to try and help operators keep engaged with their customers. We want their customers to be engaged for longer periods of time and enjoy the offerings, have good opportunities to win and try to mitigate any losses they suffer financially. We must be mindful of the situations people have found themselves in during the current climate, with the risk of redundancies and financial woes put on people. We see it time and again with legislators imposing loss limits in several jurisdictions. We really want to work with our operators to make sure they're able to sustain their own environment and the end users aren't suffering financially for it and understand their limits. Our games lend themselves to that. We look at the UK and Greece where they look at restrictions on bet sizes, which is fine with us because our customers are the smaller bettor types. Our average stake is less than £2 ($2.69) in wagers, so we welcome these changes to legislation and are happy to work with them so players can enjoy themselves with the intention of winning.

Given your global presence across LatAm, Africa and Europe, to what extent do you look to personalise for each region?

We are always looking to personalise our products to each different region. We see our current portfolio of games working across all jurisdictions and we see the same types of games resonate in similar jurisdictions. But we now know we have to tailor them as we go and enter into new markets, to suit the clients in the markets they operate in.

What do you see as key for player engagement and retention during the year ahead?

We're going to have to be very mindful of the situations people are finding themselves in as the coronavirus pandemic is still playing a part in people's daily lives. As a business, we're obviously looking at how we can increase value for our stakeholders but also how we can increase value for our clients and, in turn, their clients. It's a question of building a sustainable ecosystem that works for a number of variants across the industry and the people who are involved in it. We've worked tirelessly to make sure we've delivered a very sustainable product for our clients amid the backdrop of the pandemic and we must give a huge thank you to the teams who have delivered given the circumstances.