Q&A: Odobo CEO Ashley Lang

Gibraltar-based games platform Odobo has had a busy few months, signing up clients including LeoVegas and Gala while also integrating social casino to its B2C Odobo Play app as it looks to expand its B2C offering.

eGaming Review chatted with Odobo founder and CEO Ashley Lang about new opportunities and how to keep operators happy.

Is social casino a big growth area for you?

Yes, we’ve got big plans here so what you see today is just the tip of the iceberg. We’re adding a lot of new features to the social casino side of the product, which include heightened user engagement through customer segmentation. We’re also looking at opportunities to offer an out of the box white-label social casino product to our operators. It’s a pretty strong product roadmap of which what you see on the market today is really only a pilot release, albeit a pretty strong one.

Does the expansion of Odobo Play mark a broader shift to B2C for Odobo?

The B2C activities of our business are to support the value that we bring to our B2B customers. We’re not competing with our B2B customers, we’re looking to drive customers to them by creating another way for games to be promoted directly to the consumer. It’s a difficult environment where game developers are completely reliant on gaming operators to feature their games and earn revenue. Operators are dealing with a lot of content that they’re trying to curate on increasingly smaller screens. It’s very hard for operators to feature every game from the various suppliers they license content from, so Odobo Play is a way of creating a new marketing vehicle that allows developers and Odobo to reach the consumer with a marketing message that’s game-centric.

What are operators demanding at the moment?

High quality content, definitely. I think everyone in the industry is looking for greater efficiency. The Point of Consumption tax has hit operators in the European market and as a result they’re looking for ways to optimise and recover some of the margin pressure that’s been put on as a result of taxation and costs associated with compliance. Now it’s about how to get access to great quality games content and an increasing velocity of game releases, because customer demands are such that players want new content on a regular basis.

What new markets are you looking at?

We’re now entering a growth phase for our business. We’ve validated our technology and we’ve seen some good validation for our business model, both on the developer side and on the operator side. We’re dealing with primarily UK and European operators at the moment, but now having received that strong market endorsement for our model, we’re going to take it out to additional markets. We’re ramping up our business development resources in the North American region, the Latin American region and the Asia Pacific region to really take our business to scale.