Q&A: Odobo CEO Ashley Lang
Gaming platform chief on the firm’s new social casino real-money hybrid app the changing face of the operator supplier relationship and why the future is still HTML
Games platform Odobo recently scaled its mobile operation with the addition of social casino to its Odobo Play app. Odobo Play is the firmâs first move into the B2C sector, and the app has already been downloaded more than 50,000 times since launching at the start of the year.
It is designed to support the firmâs B2B operations and primary Marketplace app by offering users a new channel through which to discover games and the ability to click through into real-money gaming offered by operators who licence from Odobo.
It has been a busy few months for Odobo, which has also signed up new clients including LeoVegas and Gala. We spoke with the firmâs CEO about the Odobo Play app, the future of mobile development and why bespoke gaming content can give operators an edge.
eGR Mobile Intelligence (eMI): What is unique about the Odobo Play app?
Ashley Lang (AL): We have what we believe to be the only social casino app that also has the option to play for real money. In the markets where real money gaming is permitted, the players have two choices of play: they can either continue to play for virtual currency or go with real money and have a selection of operators to choose from, which are the operators who have licensed those games from us in the Odobo Marketplace. Itâs an important product for us, our game developers and the operators that are featured within the app. It represents an important new channel for customer acquisition for our gaming operators.
eMI: What plans do you have for it going forward?
AL: The data so far is actually very strong, which leads us to believe that weâre really on to something with the product. Every step in the user journey is being tracked and weâre setting benchmark KPIs for every interaction the player has with the app. Weâve got a strong team thatâs working to make incremental improvements to boost the overall performance of the app and the player experience. So Iâm pretty impressed with the numbers out of the gate and the way that weâve been able to make incremental improvements supports the investment that weâre making in the product.
eMI: How central is mobile to your plans?
AL: Itâs funny because I think we were one of the first to start out with multi-channel distribution. A single games client was a core USP from the start. If you built your game on the Odobo platform, your game was published in desktop, tablet, mobile and HTML5. Mobile was always given equal weight in that.
eMI: How has development changed as mobile becomes more prominent?
AL: I think what weâve learned from our experience over the last year is that in the construction of a game, our advice now to our developers is to begin with the small screen first. The small screen or the smartphone is the most challenging UX to optimise for the player, and itâs the most challenging for fragmentation and for the loading time of games.
Our advice to developers is to think mobile first and then upscale to desktop, whereas before I think we would have said design your game on the desktop and then downscale to support mobile. That is the direction that consumer consumption is going. It is easier for developers to use our technology to upscale, introducing additional assets or higher resolution background images when the player is on a desktop device. If you try to do it the other way around, you end up having to make too many compromises. Weâve seen a lot of that in the market where the mobile game doesnât represent the same value as the desktop game. We think that the right approach is to create the best user experience on mobile and then look how you can upscale that to desktop.
eMI: Is HTML5 going to be the focus for the foreseeable future?
AL: I donât see anything changing with HTML5 because one key issue is that operators, even via native apps, take content from a multitude of suppliers. If youâre going fully native with games content and you wish to have the games content from a number of suppliers they have to share the same code library. It would be almost impossible for an operator to curate a portfolio of games from a multitude of suppliers but have them all built to their own code library. The model is going to continue to be a hybrid approach where HTML5 is the default technology for publishing games content through the web browser and then even in mobile. I see the future still being that the game itself is HTML5, but itâs housed within a native application that provides the infrastructure for it.
eMI: Where do you see gaming content fitting into the longer term strategy for operators?
AL: I think increasingly operators are going to start seeing content as part of their marketing strategy, and looking to have content that differentiates them from their competitors. We will see more operators putting out RFQs to games studios to build exclusive content. One interesting development we anticipated but didnât expect to pick up pace so quickly is that operators are now starting to roll up their sleeves and interact through us with game developers. And because all the games are built on the same technology framework and platform, operators have the comfort of knowing that as they commission these games there will be a consistency of the rights compatibility, performance and framework across the games that come from various different studios.
Read the full interview with Ashley in eGR Mobile Intelligence issue 21 here