Q&A: Daniel Lindberg, CEO, Quickspin
Lindberg talks to eGaming Review about the supplier's mobile strategy and how it's targeting the UK market
eGaming Review (eGR): You recently won two awards at the eGR B2B awards. What do you put your success down to?
Daniel Lindberg (DL): It’s hard work paying off. Since we started two-and-a-half years ago we’ve been focused on developing high quality and innovative games which have now been available in the online gambling market for a year-and-a-half after being live on F2P for two years. We’ve been posting healthy numbers for about 18 months and the growth has been really organic as we’ve not had to take much money out of our cash reserves.
eGR: How big is the team now and how is the development team split?
DL: Over the past year we’ve grown the company by 50% and now have 30 employees in total. That’s split across five different teams of which four are focusing on game development, divided equally between mobile and desktop. The fifth team integrates the games to the various distribution partners we have.
eGR: What is your approach to developing a successful slots game?
DL: It typically starts with a concept phase, then a prototyping phase, pre-production and then production. In the concept phase we usually start with five to ten concepts, of that two or three will go into prototype where we develop its core functionality. Then we choose one or two games for the pre-production stage where we produce the graphical guidelines and then we choose the final game. We believe this is one of the key reasons as to why our games work so well as all the bad ideas are find out early on and we know when we start production what the game will be like. We are also in a unique position in that we typically launch our games as free-to-play six to eight months before it goes live on real-money. One of the insights we’ve learned is that if the game performs well on social, it will perform well as a gambling game as well. This enables us to increase our hit-rate even further, compared to our competitors.
eGR: How many games do you have in your portfolio?
DL: We have 13 desktop games and six mobile games. Big Bad Wolf, which won Game of the Year at last year’s awards, is performing exceptionally well but we now have a handful which are also performing in the region of that game such as Treasure Island and Sinbad.
eGR: Could you see Quickspin diversifying into other verticals in the future?
DL: I doubt it as the market potential for the slots segment is so big and new ideas and opportunities arrive all the time. I think it’s best to stick to what we do best.
eGR: Is the UK market the main focus for you now?
DL: It’s a big market and there are lot of big operators there. It’s also a regulated market and we are in the process of becoming compliant with the new regulations. Scandinavia is still our biggest market through our partnerships with Unibet, Mr Green and Betsson, but with new UK deals I would not be surprised if the UK became our biggest market next year.
eGR: How has your approach to mobile changed?
eGR: Mobile is the reason we grew from 20 to 30 people this year. But we do things a bit differently to other companies. We obviously still develop in HTML5 but we think it has its limitations. So in parallel with HTML5 we also do native development such as the product we launched with Unibet called Spin City which has games developed in native launched within a native app. Because it is developed in native, the richness of the game is so much better than an HTML5 game.