Betixon is an iGaming developer that focuses on establishing innovative gaming products by focusing on a mobile-first and social experience. Over the years, the company’s library has swelled to feature numerous titles all of which have been made available to partners.
The company owns numerous licenses allowing it to operate in key European markets and comply with regulatory standards. All titles are based on HTML5 technology which makes them incredibly flexible and easy to deliver across a number of platforms, making sure that the consumer experience comes first.
Recently, Betixon introduced the SpinXP feature that adds a game-changing experience in the online gaming industry bringing communities together by enabling the consumer base to cheer for each fellow player’s win.
It’s a solution that allows people to feel less alone while enjoying their hobby, argues Betixon. Today, we sit down with Betixon to discuss the company’s development philosophy, current success, and future ambitions.
Q: Betixon is a brand that focuses on the social and mobile gaming experiences in iGaming. Can you tell us a little more about your philosophy and how you built gameplay that brings people together?
A: When we initially founded the company we wanted to focus on two main things while making games.
One Is efficiency. If we are efficient enough to create quality games with ongoing new features in a short time, we are able to provide the operator with his own exclusive and branded quality content, and with a competitive pricing model which helps the operator to increase his shrinking margin in regulated markets.
The second is innovation, which is a bit trickier to achieve because innovating casino games and slots machines are quite a challenge.
You don’t want to interfere with how players like to play or how the operator makes a profit. But eventually, you do want to bring something else to the table and find a new way to enhance the experience for the player.
During the past years, we have been trying to do exactly that by introducing multiplayer table games, and unique instant wins mechanics that are built into a slot machine.
Like in many other companies not everything we do is an immediate success and is released. But we keep trying all the time and learn a lot through the process, and from time to time we find a gem to release.
Q: Why is SpinXP important addition to your arsenal of gaming tools and how well is it received by players?
A: SpinXP is a widget that we have been sitting on for quite some time now. The mechanic was built a long time ago, But it has been only released recently.
Playing slots online is a solo session gameplay, no matter if it is rich in features slots, or a simple fruit machine, the social aspect of the game session is the same. So this is something we always wanted to try and change. However, it’s not a simple thing to do, because you don’t want to interrupt the player’s solo game mode.
We actually figured it out after one of the conventions, when we were sitting in the casino, and this lady triggered a bonus with a nice win, the people around her stopped playing and started clapping and cheering for her win. A few seconds later they were all back to their own solo mode at their machines.
So with SpinXP we created this 5-10 seconds of a joyful and happy event that we saw in the land-based casino and brought it up online in our games.
All players receive a nonintrusive small popup of wins from other players, giving them a chance to react by clicking a “thumbs up” or a “heart” icon which is then being sent in real-time back to the player while he still seeing his winning animations running.
Then the winning player is shown a popup back with all the hearts and thumbs up flying on the side of his screen. A few seconds later everyone is back to their own business, exactly like we saw in real life.
We ran the widget on live traffic for a few days as a test and when we analyzed the results we were amazed. We saw on average 10% reactions to the win popups, in some jurisdictions we saw it climbing to 50% of the online players in that jurisdiction, reacting to these pop-ups.
That’s when we knew that we finally found a way for the online slot player not to feel alone.
Q: How do you decide what product to develop next?
A: The game’s ideas sometimes come from customers if it’s exclusive content, or from anyone in the team. We pile them in a list and work through them when needed.
In parallel to that process, sometimes someone comes up with an idea – the crazier the better! Once we rip it apart , if we are only left with just plain crazy we ditch it, but if we have crazy but with a decent amount of practical usage, we place it in the queue for prototyping.
Q: What is your opinion about newly-regulated markets in Europe and the ongoing re-regulation push in some of your established markets?
A: We are happy about the regulations in general. I think regulations help to clear the industry’s reputation and filter some of the bad things that sometimes happen in the industry.
Sometimes the rules in certain jurisdictions are challenging and don’t really help to protect the players as much as they would like to, but it also challenges the operators to find ways of being more efficient, if it’s via technology to help automation or content that increases the lifetime value of a player while keeping in line with responsible gambling policies.
Q: Do you see more room to improve the iGaming experience today and if so how?
A: Yes, of course, I think that one of the main issues is technology and content.
Today almost all sites’ lobbies look the same, with the same content, the same offers, sometimes even on the same platform which produces the exact same website and capabilities.
I believe exclusive content is key, some of the big operators have their own studios which produce exclusive content on a regular basis, their ongoing offering already provides a different experience to the player, but even in that scenario, you might want some new innovative features or mechanic that came from one of the studios inside an exclusive title.
The iGaming in the US at the moment lacks content when you compare it to Europe. Because there are a lot fewer licensed providers, and any provider that gets in, everyone wants that content and integrates that content, so exclusive content is key for an enhanced experience.
The second issue is technology, the more tech the operator has inhouse, the less they are dependent on a third party for improving necessary flows, for example:- deposits and withdrawals, KYC and AML processes, or quick new gaming content integrations and loyalty features that competitors don’t have yet.