Welcome, Ittai! We appreciate that you’ve given us some time to chat with you. Please introduce yourself and describe your background in the iGaming sector.

Thank you for having me, I highly appreciate the opportunity to talk with you. I’ve been in and around igaming since 2005. Coming from a strong engineering and application lifecycle background. I was first involved in consulting and helping build development groups for a big operator.

From there I moved to co-found a startup in the poker domain, we build realtime tools for online players (odds calculator, hud, etc.). This was during the wild days of online poker when you could watch Phil Ivey playing live on Full Tilt. After these hectic and exciting endeavours I decided to focus more on business, product and operations, by leading the casino products for different companies, and consulting others.

Finally landed at RubyPlay to lead the operations just over a year ago. I missed the startup life for almost 7 years and RubyPlay felt just right.

What’s the RubyPlay vision and how is it embedded in your company culture?

RubyPlay believes that amazing games are not a commodity. Times are changing, the players are changing, the industry is changing and content needs to evolve to cater to that change.

We believe that you have to rethink axioms and find new ways to entertain people.

We bring a vast knowledge of game production from different domains, tons of product and business experience and a meticulous attention to details, in an effort to create the most entertaining games and best value for our customers.

We believe in generating value and bringing results, while keeping open and honest communications, keeping our integrity, pushing our limits, and having fun while doing so, after all, we build games!

You’ve been around since 2018 but still managed to release 36 games, quite impressive! How would you describe your portfolio in general?

Thanks 🙂

The team has done an amazing job, building the games, and quickly assemble a "production line" to be able to deliver games in minimal time with the highest possible quality. We continually work on improving our processes, focusing our efforts, and mainly choosing what not to do. I think many startups fail in this regard.

We have so many great ideas to try out and goals to achieve, but for now, we try to be laser focused to meet our business objectives and create business momentum. It’s been about 18 months since we first launched our first game with customers and the responses have been nothing short of amazing.

Our philosophy is about building great rich entertaining games that any player can value and enjoy. We’re trying to take the “Vegas Experience” into online and converge it with features that we know to work from other domains.

Our portfolio is a work in progress. At the beginning, the idea was to target more of the Asian markets. Hence some of our early work looks and feels Asian, including volatility and RTP. However, around the time I joined we quickly realized that in order to achieve sustainable growth, we will need to focus more on European and western markets. As a startup, you must focus and since resources are scarce you need to make sure you utilize your knowledge and expertise as efficiently as possible.

So speaking about our games I would say you can define them as the best land-based experience online can buy. We put a lot of emphasis on the super-rich graphics, sound, UI, smoothness of gameplay, and of course mechanics and math.

One of our “secrets” is our technology stack, it allows us to develop quicker and deploy faster, we are fully cloud-based and this helps us reduce complexity and cost. Since we are new we don’t have any legacy considerations this all helps us with time to market.

The second secret sauce is our brilliant math and game designers, they have developed hypotheses around how to balance the math and mechanics and we are now proving (or disproving) it with each new release, carefully balancing the games to create a much richer experience. And the most important secret is our talent pool, we employ amazing talents with versatile domain expertise, coming from land-based, social and online with great energy and intelligence which helps us achieve more with less.

Looking at our SlotRank numbers it’s clear that the games are popular, in several different regions. What is the key to ensuring quality with such a packed release schedule?

It’s not easy! and it demands dedication, proactiveness and ownership from each of the team members. Understanding of our strategy and goals and how each of them is helping in achieving this. Secondly it’s about focus, we’re focusing on fewer markets, fewer features, fewer mechanics, but everything we produce and release we make sure is top-notch. Lastly we try to keep a very open culture of learning from our mistakes and improving.

What are the most crucial things regarding game development that you’ve learned since the foundation of RubyPlay?

That’s a great question 🙂

I think my main takeaway (so far) is not specifically about game development per se, but more about how you approach your product and deliverables, and that is that delivering value is not about your strategy, but rather about your customer’s strategy and goals, if you focus on understanding what your customer needs, if you try to reduce their friction and help them meet their goals you’ll achieve yours.

Is there a specific area of game development that you feel that you’ve improved on in your latest releases?

We’ve become more adept and reliable at turnaround times and pinpointing how long something takes to create. We have a strong, open communication between our designers and developers, where nothing is sacred. If something isn’t working, or something is too complicated to produce, we’ll make changes.

Speaking of your latest releases. Your game Alice in the wild has been doing great in the UK! How would you sell the game to players who haven’t tried it out yet?

Thanks, it’s one of our personal favourites and a world that our team loved building.

A quick 30-second elevator pitch — we’re introducing you to Alice in Wonderland, updated to the modern social media era. We tease you with persistent, moving wilds that can contain credits, multipliers, and Free Games — all of which can be won if you catch them. And meanwhile, you’re earning Ruby Coins, which can be used to play a bonus.

Your April release Quest of Gods also seems to be a player favourite according to our data. Why do you think this game got so appreciated by players?

Quest of Gods was a huge effort and a big promise and it sure has delivered on that promise. To name just a few reasons for its success: mythology and gods are known eye candy for players, the collection mechanic, allowing players to progress in the map and finally the hero journey, every new step opens higher win possibilities.

We’re interested in your upcoming games, what games can we look forward to in the close future?

We can’t wait to show you two very different games that we’re about to launch:

Dr.Frankenstein — this game has more of a classic math feel with our best graphics and sound to date. It has just two features — random wilds and a random multiplier — and the excitement comes when both occur at once.

Blazing Tiger — this one is even simpler, where what you see is what you get. Any Free Games and credits can be won off symbols, if only you land a special symbol.

We like doing the big, complex games like Quest of Gods, but we also like to concentrate on core features that players like.

Let’s have a look at your competitors. Which games have you been impressed with? Please motivate!

There are so many good companies out there and the vendor landscape is getting more and more crowded and it’s really hard to keep track of everything.

To me, some of the companies that have stood out lately are, 4theplayer with their 1000x busta. They have taken a fresh approach to build games, trying to break from the norm. I think they are on the right track!

Big Time Gaming with their Megaways mechanics, which generates tons of action for players and streamers love it. And I think finding new sources of revenue for vendors (through licensing the brand name in this example) is key and BTG nailed it!

Lately, I enjoyed playing Money Train 2 by Relax. I think Relax is leading the pack, having a great aggregation platform as well as an amazing studio. However, my all-time favourite game is still SHFL’s 88 Fortunes.

If we look past regulation, what are the main differences between producing a quality slot today compared to two years ago when RubyPlay was founded?

It’s very difficult to separate the regulations when discussing this because it is the main driver in our industry. However, I think the main difference from two years ago is we’ve gained a greater awareness of what it means to be in the global market.

Rather than focusing on one niche player, we now know more about producing the types of games that all players should enjoy.

Do you have any personal predictions about the future of the iGaming market?

Thank you for this, I can discuss this for hours 🙂 I feel this is in the core of my responsibilities and so I spend a lot of time thinking about this.

Aside from regulations and M&A which will continue to shape our industry in the years to come, I see several things that need to be addressed.

Adopting the games to newer generations like the Gen Z and later Gen Alpha which are shown to have less interest in gambling at its current format. I’m sure we’ll see lots of new things emerging from this, gamification should continue to expand and be incorporated into the entire funnel including the games! Which I feel will enhance the player experience and allow the vendors to develop more engaging games.

For this to happen we will need to find ways to formalize the communications and protocols to ease on the integrations between systems. This will also create more opportunities for innovation in other areas which are not in the core of the game as well as tighter cross-product integrations.

In the longer term, I (hope to) see blockchain changing much of our industry in areas such as payments, security, trust, KYC, responsible gambling, etc.

I would like to see games becoming more dynamic, and tailored (in real-time) to the player’s preferences and journey to creating a more unique gaming experience with every session. I’m sure data will become a more prominent factor in our deliverables.

And so much more…

Thanks for giving us this opportunity to chat with you Ittai! Would you like to say anything to our readers before we wrap this up?

Thanks, it’s been a pleasure! Hope your audience will get to know more about RubyPlay and enjoy our games!