Real Dealer Studios CPO Shane Cotter on the Hot, Cinematic Alternative to Live Casino

Innovation in iGaming is always fun to behold and the success stories of companies such as Real Dealer Studios can serve as inspiration to others. In light of the studio’s latest product release, Multifire Auto Roulette, we take a closer look at what Real Dealer Studios does to take familiar online gaming mechanics to the next level.

In essence, the company combines pre-recorded video with RNG gameplay, setting it apart from traditional live casino gaming and adding a unique twist to the experience. The company’s stated goal is simple: develop innovative and entertaining online casino games.

Great looks are part of the offer, as showcased with Multifire Auto Roulette, but this is not all there is to the studio and its innovative games. To better understand the mechanics behind RDS’ products, we spoke to Shane Cotter, Chief Product Officer at Real Dealer.  

Q: Can you tell us a few words about Real Dealer Studios, what your main product expertise is and how do you stand out from similar products in the market?

Frankly there aren’t any similar products in the market, which goes a long way to explain what Real Dealer Studios is all about. Until now there have been two categories of online casino game – the traditional, animated RNG slots and table games and live casino products.

Each has its upsides but there’s a huge gap between the experiences they deliver. We’ve leveraged our expertise in filmmaking to develop a third category, a new kind of RNG game that brings in a cinematic level of realism and a human element along with a vastly superior video and streaming quality than what live dealer can offer.

Q: Has your one-to-one experience been a success so far? Consumer preferences seem to favor tailored approaches. Is this what the one-on-one experience by Real Dealer Studios is?

You’ve touched on one of the big differences between Real Dealer’s games and live casino. The latter are one-to-many, set in a busy studio environment where the dealer speaks to an invisible mass audience and responds to chat messages.

Our games are designed to feel more like a private, VIP room in a land-based casino. The dealer, played by a professional actor, interacts with you and only you, reacting to your bets and wins. A lot of players prefer to cut out the noise in this way and feel more connected to the dealer, even if that dealer is pre-recorded.

Q: Do you reckon the pre-recorded videos detract from the “live experience” or do they actually improve it?

A key point is that we’re not trying to recreate the “live experience” but rather provide an alternative to it, one that avoids many of live’s drawbacks like the tired dealers, errors, poor audio and streaming issues.

By taking a cinematic approach to game production, we can keep the best takes, process the video and edit it into the game to ensure that every round is perfect. With our games, the dealers are always smiling, and the audio-visual quality is vastly superior.  

This overcomes some of the drawbacks to live dealer and delivers an unrivalled player experience from their first round to the last.

Q: How would you explain the difference between a live casino and what Real Dealer Studios does?

In a nutshell, it’s the difference between live streaming and a professional cinematic production. With live, you establish a 24/7 studio operation, set everything in place and hope for the best – sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

When you take a moviemaking approach, you have the time and opportunity to perfect the product, which runs as a standalone RNG game that’s not tethered to any studio. This ensures the product not only works at all times, but also works to its absolute best at all times.

Q: When sitting at the drawing board, do you see better opportunities to create new gamification solutions thanks to the combination of pre-recorded videos and RNG?

The novel approach opens up to plenty of possibilities and the ideas that come up in our brainstorming sessions get can get pretty wild, but this, of course, is a good thing.

Essentially anything you can do with gamification in an RNG game can be done with our games, but with our Hollywood set-up we can combine this with specific dealer reactions, changing dealers, changing locations and even taking the player through a kind of interactive adventure story.

We’re still pretty far away from a game that features laser shootouts in a Martian casino, but maybe someday.  

Q: What are your plans for 2021?

2021 is shaping up to be a busy year for us. We’ve just released our first show game, a money-wheel product called Fortune Finder, and recently began deploying localised versions of our roulette games with native-language (rather than English-speaking) dealers.

We’re also starting production on our first blackjack game. In the near future we hope to be able to announce our first celebrity dealer, so keep an eye on the industry press to find out which big-name will be presenting our games.