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Disruptions and user experience Yggdrasil CEO Fredrik Elmqvist speaks to Tim Poole about the evolution of gaming, the importance of user experience and how key disruptions have impacted the industry You’ve been at the helm of Yggdrasil for almost 10 years. How do you reflect on this? Coming towards 10 years exactly, it’s been an interesting adventure in that sense. I think it is fair to say that the industry has evolved a lot since then. We believe it’s a better user experience to let the players select from various types of games instead of just having a smaller, limited range. And I think that disruption has been pretty big because it led to more innovation, and this was allowed because we had taken down the barriers around manual fund transfers, which enabled a slow evolution of more providers. At Yggdrasil, we see third-party partnerships coming and joining our development cycle, they are licensing our intellectual properties to get their content into our big network. I think that is the next disruptor; we are kind of in the middle of it, we see our top line growing pretty well due to that; we never wanted to be a hub. Aggregation has been there all the time, we wanted to disrupt the aggregation by developing this piece of tech called GATI (Game Adaptation Tools & Interface) in the regulatory landscape, allowing each part of a chain to do what they do best. So we are kind of in the ideals of that and sailing through it at the moment, which is very exciting. Given these disruptions, on a scale from 'slightly different' to 'unrecognisable,' just how much would you say the industry has changed during this time? Well, for me, a lot. I can only look at the casino side and slot side of this mainly. There I see a lot of disruptions, but it all started with seamless wallet and free spins. Seamless wallet broke down the barriers; and that led to branching to new innovations that led to new disruptions. Everything is driven by the user experience. What I see now if I compare the casino with sports betting is that it’s been pretty big with tech and software. I think there will be a lot of
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innovation coming from the US in sport. I do think casinos still do have disruptions to come, based on what we are doing with GATI, opening up third parties, enabling people undertaking R&D (research and development) based on being convinced on a strategy or user experience. So do I see a change? I’ve seen a lot more sports involvement in the last year. You mentioned as well how Yggdrasil has adapted and, as you say, perhaps caused some disruption. In the next 6-12 months, given the Masters Programme and your aim to be seen as a global publisher, what is on Yggdrasil's roadmap? We focused a lot on the B2B technology side; we are a provider to the operators but also to the studios. You see a lot of focus on the tech to make it scalable, which is very important. Today we are actually doing a lot more with a lot less resources, which is a huge difference from two and a half years ago. What we are working on now is to be seen as not only a B2B company, but as a B2B company working on consumer and gambling B2C products. So, you will see more of this, and will see new types of games coming out, games like Vikings Go Berzerk Reloaded. A different focus from the beginning, on the R&D front, is focusing on the gambling user experience. We are taking back the B2C experience, focusing a lot more on our own intellectual property. We are also focusing a lot around monetising on the “GEMs,” the Game Engagement Mechanics that we licence to our partners. Because we see that when the players recognise the mechanics, it’s a win-win for the studio. You’ll see more known and working mechanisms but with permutations from us and our partners. We are going to be much tighter with the B2C experience of the products. It’s been implemented since August, but it will continue – it’s part of a strategy.
