GameAccount has gone from strength-to-strength since it was founded six years ago and 2009 is set to be another busy year for the company, as Simon Liddle found out when he spoke to Kevin Dale, chief executive officer

Since its creation back in 2002, UK-based player-to-player games provider GameAccount has seen major shifts within the online gaming industry. Placing itself at the forefront of new games development, the company has built up an impressive portfolio of clients and a community of players that spans the globe.

Having initially offered shooting, pool and golf games, GameAccount spent the next six years developing products that combined both skill and chance. In this short time it has grown from offering players casual gaming experiences to becoming "a bit more hardcore" and now boasts a suite of games that includes backgammon, gin rummy, poker, dice and multiplayer blackjack.

"It’s been a mad, mad couple of years," admitted Kevin Dale, who joined the company in 2004 and has served as the company’s chief executive officer since 2006.

"We are much more a B2B supplier of that product to all the sportsbooks these days, rather than being an operator. We’ve changed our distribution and changed our product," he remarked.

During this period of transition, the company’s player-base has gone from being 60:40 female-male, to 30:70. It now also works with a host of bookmakers providing high-stakes skill-based gaming. With this change in focus, the company found that a particular formula of skill and chance was the key to successful online games - something Dale said it learned the hard way.

"Golf and pool never made any money because the good players, who practice a hell of a lot and know all the little tricks and techniques, would always beat the newbies.

"So people would come on, deposit, play a few free games and then start playing for money and then get beaten up."

GameAccount licenses its network to operator partners, offering a tailor-made white-label service or a fully integrated single-wallet service for sportsbook, casino and poker operators.

The company’s list of clients now reads like a who’s who of the online gaming industry, including William Hill, Paddypower.com and Stan James. So what makes GameAccount’s products so popular? Dale believes it’s the company’s ability to stand out from the crowd.

"There isn’t anyone else out there who has a set of games like we do," he said. "Ultimately for them it’s about a complementary product and incremental revenues.

"We’re another channel to give their customers more content, more things to play on, more of a reason to stay on their website."

Multiple fun

According to Dale, while players tend to be attracted to gaming sites by multiplayer games, often they play single-player games while they wait for their tournament to start or for someone to match their game offer.

This combination of games has a number of advantages for sportsbook operators, he explained. The likes of William Hill and Stan James benefit from offering their customers such content because it helps to extend the length of time people spend on their websites, enabling them to make more money per minute of each session.

"Our products are a bit more community-based; we have chat rooms and so on, so it’s just a little bit different for them really and they make good money out of it," he added.

GameAccount’s network is a truly international affair, bringing together players of all abilities from more than 130 countries. This poses a number of challenges when developing games, particularly as it can be hard to predict how they will be received across such a diverse range of territories.

"When we roll out with a sportsbook, they’re stronger in certain countries than they are in others," said Dale. "Players in Turkey and Greece love their backgammon, there’s no doubt about it. You’ll see people playing in the cafés over there, and that goes for the whole of the Middle East, whether it’s Israel, Iraq, Iran and so on, because the game is Middle Eastern in origin.

"One surprising one was Bulgaria. We have absolutely thousands of people from Bulgaria playing our backgammon - all fairly small stakes, but a big, big community in Bulgaria.

"We launched dominoes about two and a half months ago and it’s been huge in South America and Poland, of all places."

Unlike chess or Monopoly, for instance, dominoes makes for a suitable online P2P game because it’s played by thousands of people around the world and is easy to get to grips with - characteristics that tend to be common among the most popular online games.

When considering what makes a good product, Dale suggested there is a kind of online gaming ‘continuum,’ with bingo - which can be like tossing a coin when played as a P2P game - at one end and chess at the other.

"Chess will not make any money because a skillful player will always beat a less skillful player, and it doesn’t take long to work out who’s the most skillful," he said.

The perfect game

Because it is so rare to find someone with identical levels of skill for any skill games, Dale believes those such as golf, pool and Bejeweled are unlikely to make any money unless the provider’s business model is based on subscriptions or downloads.

Poker, on the other hand, has the perfect combination of skill and chance - something that GameAccount has sought to emulate when developing other online games.

"It’s the magic poker combination really that you should be looking for. If you haven’t found that ultimately it will fail; unfortunately we found that out with too many products," commented Dale.

Certain games, such as Connect Four or chess, to which programmed bots can be applied to, also cause headaches for developers and operators and inevitably impact upon the revenue potential of a game.

"Take Connect Four, for example. If you hook a bot up to it that knows what the perfect strategy is for it, other players are going to get beaten every single time," Dale explained.

Unsurprisingly, given the attraction of the potentially large returns on offer, poker does not escape the attention of bot programmers and GameAccount’s CEO warned that although there are still elements of uncertainty within the game, there is still a risk that players will seek to gain an advantage in this way.

"Give it a couple of years and I think there will be poker bots on the internet that are doing very, very well," he said.

Service providers will need to be equal to the task and as the number of poker bots increases companies will seek to make small changes to their game client to ensure they cannot be cracked by such programs.
2008 proved to be good year for GameAccount.

Despite operating in a climate of global economic turmoil, the company’s staked revenues exceeded £120m and the number of active users playing its games increased.

Challenging times 

However, Dale was quick to dismiss suggestions that the gambling industry is somehow immune to the onset of a recession, even though gaming companies emerged from the last economic downturn notably less battered and bruised than many other businesses.

"Back then it wasn’t really an internet world, so you’re not really comparing apples with apples," he remarked.

The internet gaming industry is likely to do better than shops during the downturn, he predicted, suggesting that people may choose to stay at home and possibly risk more money on gaming. But this will not last forever, he warned.

"You might make a temporary gain, but if the recession lasts for more than a year it will definitely start to bite then across all sectors.

"But at the moment, I have to say, we’ve had an amazing time, as have quite a few companies that we’ve spoken to, so it’s done us no harm so far."

So what does 2009 hold for GameAccount? ‘More of the same’ is the message from its CEO. The company is set to go live with a number of new bookmakers, three-card brag is on the way, while more community-based games are in the pipeline.

Dale is also keen for the company to move beyond head-to-head gaming and explore the possibility of developing one-versus-many games, as well as targeting local markets and offering more languages and currencies.

"Giving people locally what they want would be the best way of expanding internationally," he said, noting that the company has already turned its attention to an Italian P2P trumps game and a German three-player bridge game.

"Such games are potentially viable online if it is possible to eliminate collusion between players, he added. And the main challenge facing the company this year?

"The usual too many projects, too little time," said Dale, "which I’m pretty sure everybody has.

"Every company I’ve ever worked for in this industry faces the same question: the prioritisation of those - making sure you are spending the time developing the things that will give you the biggest bang for your buck."