How have Bluberi’s products evolved over the past year?
We’ve really had a deep focus on our core products and, in particular, the process that we use to develop those games. As a result, we’ve seen some really great results from our newest games including, or starting with, Treasure Hunter and Fortune Filler, and culminating with the game Devil’s Lock, which we saw got off to a great start. We’re also really happy to see the progress with our core products on our Novusb49 cabinet over the last year.
I was wondering if you could speak about the R&D process?
We have a really sophisticated process that puts a tremendous amount of input into development. We don’t really subscribe to the notion that there’s one person in the basement mixing magic elixirs, trying to build some great product. Our process is more about having some people who have great ideas and collaborating to get those ideas into a form that we think will be fun for players. So we do player focus groups, we do internal focus groups, and internal surveys of each other. We have lots of eyes on every game we’re developing, and that’s really resulted in some good success for us.
How do you plan on growing your market share in the next year?
The biggest thing for us is going to be entry into new markets. So we’re only licensed in about 40% of the total markets in North America and we’re applying to a handful more, but over the next year, you’re going to see us hopefully be licensed in every single market in North America. Beyond that who knows? But that’s really our focus for the next few years – getting new jurisdictional licenses.
What is Bluberi hoping to get out of G2E this year?
We’re really excited. We’re going to try to take everyone who comes into our product booth on a journey and really help them understand all the stuff we’ve put into place over the last year and what that’s resulting in. We’re excited to show people our core roadmap and we’ll have all the latest and greatest games on that roadmap on display, with hopefully some more in-depth insights to the game development process, even more so than you would get at another booth. We really believe in transparency and trying to lift the magic curtain on game development to let our customers understand why we made the decisions we made and how we came up with the games we came up with.
Where do you want to see the company 18-24 months from now?
We want to be big; we want to grow. Right about now we have 2,900 units, call it around 3,000 units, total in North America. We want to have 10,000 units in the market by the end of 2025. We have big ambitions to grow the business and we’re on pace to do that. We’re on pace for our plans for this year and and we really want to become a bigger business than we are today.
