Q&A: Daniel Eskola on Unibet's bingo plans

Unibet’s gaming team isn’t afraid of taking a few risks. Last year the Stockholm-listed operator announced bold plans to leave the Microgaming Poker Network in favour of launching a new standalone Relax Gaming-powered poker client.

Despite not yet leading to an uptick in year-on-year revenues, the decision has resulted in some benefits with players churning at a slower rate and active daily players are up.

Now Unibet is aiming to replicate this success in bingo. The operator has opted to not renew its Virtue Fusion contract and launch a standalone product in partnership with Relax Gaming later this year. eGaming Review spoke to the operator’s head of gaming Daniel Eskola to find out more.

eGaming Review (eGR): Why is Unibet leaving Virtue Fusion to launch a new standalone bingo product?

Daniel Eskola (DE): One of the main factors was how our new poker product has performed since switching from being on a network to launching our own client; it’s exceeded our expectations. Bingo is internally not the highest priority, sports betting and casino are, but although it hasn’t performed badly, it hasn’t really been growing either. However, with sports betting and casino growing faster, bingo is becoming a marginalised product like poker. It’s either going to become an even smaller percentage of the business or we can try something new and exciting.

eGR: What lessons did you specifically learn from the poker launch?

DE: We don’t look at poker rake as a main KPI anymore or how much it’s making, we’re assessing how the customers are getting through the door and how effectively we’re cross-selling those players. For those customers playing casino and poker at Unibet, we see that their lifetime is longer than a casino-only player. We’re really trying to make bingo become a better complement to our casino-focus, particularly for the Maria brand and the aim is to launch the product in mid-2015.

eGR: So the plan is to make bingo a more useful acquisition tool and cross-sell players into casino?

DE: Exactly and by doing that, we’re adding casino elements into the bingo gameplay and loyalty mechanics. There will be a full integration of the casino games we currently have on-site which will be made accessible while the customer is playing as well. So that adds an extra step because with the loyalty programme we can direct them to play more of the casino games with the aim of them becoming a multi-product user with both bingo and the regular casino.

eGR: How did Playtech take the decision?

DE: I’m sure it’s never fun to lose a licensee but they’ve been very accepting and willing to assist us with a smooth migration which is very important when our customers have been playing one software for over five years. It’s always a risk from our perspective as well in terms of how the players react to a new client as a lot of people don’t like change. With poker we lost quite a lot of the grinders and the high-value players, so we might see something similar at the beginning with bingo but we should start growing that back quite fast.

eGR: Why did you decide to partner with Relax Gaming, which has limited experience in the vertical?

DE: They have worked on bingo for a small, local Finnish brand in the past so they do have some bingo expertise, but they are also very fast to market as well. But mainly it’s about the poker product doing so well and how easy it’s been to cooperate with them, plus as the biggest operator on the new network, we have more control of the roadmap as. It’s not like there’s ten other operators on the network all deciding what we need to be doing, we can set out what our priorities are and in what order. Another partner is joining the Unibet, Maria and Bingo.com brands called iGame which will launch at the same time as us.

eGR: How will Unibet Bingo differ to other bingo products in the market?

DE: We have really high ambitions but in reality, time is always a factor. In the beginning, it’s just going to be a minimal viable product and quite similar to those already out there but we will make it more on-brand and graphically rich. We have some very cool ideas which we’ll look to introduce as soon as we can and although I wouldn’t expect too much innovation for the first version, by the end of the year we are going to introduce quite a few new concepts which haven’t been seen in the bingo world before. Today, bingo doesn’t appeal to that wide of an audience and a casino player might not want to play bingo because it’s not exciting enough. So we’re trying to add a layer of adrenaline to make it more of a fun gambling game and get the heart racing a little bit.