“With our new RGS platform, we can double the business in the next three years”

How do you assess BetGames’ performance for the third quarter of 2024? Were the revenues and profits achieved in line with your expectations?

We have a phenomenal year, growing >40%. So, yes – fully on track.

Which segments of BetGames’ business were the most profitable in the third quarter? Do you notice any products or markets growing faster than others?

Luckily, all our verticals are growing, but we see our RNG vertical contributing massively. From a market perspective we saw strong progress in Brazil and our core market Africa with >50% growth in each.

Are you planning any changes or new investments in the near future? What priorities do you see for the last quarter of 2024?

Brazil will obviously a huge focus and challenging from a regulatory perspective. We have 3 test labs running in parallel and a dev team on it to get everything in place for 1 Jan. With our regulated volumes being >80%, we will continue to invest here. Q4 is busy for our compliance team.

From a product perspective, we are in the final steps of getting our RGS up and running. We plan to launch >3 dozen new games next year. That requires lots of preparation from all teams, Product, Dev, Commercial, etc.

In July 2024, BetGames introduced the 4-day working week model. Are any benefits already visible, both in terms of employee wellbeing and financially?

Still early days. The key findings are that we have not seen any decline in productivity, customer satisfaction or business performance. We see this positively. A significant positive change happened from an Employer Attractiveness and Branding perspective. We are way quicker hiring new talent, get significantly more applications and the acceptance rate is almost 100%. This is quite a significant advantage.

In your initial report, you mentioned that the project aims to increase ‘social bonding’ and team creativity. What specific measures, apart from changing the work schedule, have been taken to actually reinforce these values?

We increased the number of events, introduced new formats like hackathons, introduced new team bonding budgets, moved things like our sprint demos (both IT and Commercial use scrum at betgames) to in-person ceremonies etc. There is still a long way to go to reach the goal, but we want to ensure that we “out-experiment” the competition in terms of organisational adjustments and pilots. We are agile enough to fail quickly.

Has the company introduced any other initiatives to promote wellbeing? What benefits do you offer your employees?

I briefed the leadership team on two main things:

1. Fair compensation, which means benchmarking the market every 6-months with an external agency plus 2-3 really meaningful benefits. In our case, this is an industry leading private health insurance for everyone and a company store that allows everyone to spend a few hundred bucks a year on all kinds of useful things, from paying your Netflix subscription, to restaurant and SPA vouchers. Consumption on these things is almost 100%. Currently, it is obviously also the 4 day workweek.
2. “Don’t tell them how to do their job!” The level of micromanagement is very low at bet games. Some people “need” it, which is fine, but generally speaking, people must figure out how to get the WHAT done themselves. Some people struggle with this, but the majority appreciates the freedom to operate. Nobody gets punished for making mistakes; it is rather the opposite: you get questions if you don’t break a few eggs every now and then.

Of course, we do parties to celebrate our successes and other stuff as well, but these make no difference for senior people. In my 18 years in the software industry, I’ve never met a single mid to senior-level person who stuck with a company because of free pizza and great parties.

A few indicators that convince me that this works are:

• the average tenure of betgames employees is 5 years, which is quite high for a growing software company.
• You would not believe the % of leavers who knock on the door again after a few months.

Andreas Koeberl, CEO BetGames

What are the most important lessons learned from your experiment with the 4-day work week? In your opinion, can the iGaming industry globally implement such a solution?

The beauty and the challenge of social sciences is that “it depends” is always the correct answer. There are so many impacting factors from your cultural setting, size of the company, leadership skill level, etc. So, the unsatisfying answer is: no, you can’t assume this is great for every igaming company.

We are very transparent about our pilot and results because we want the industry and especially the underdogs to get inspired and learn from the pilot. As a creative software company, we fully depend on our talent and hence, you need to do something meaningful. Again, compensate them well, give them freedom to operate and find 2-3 truly meaningful benefits – if one of these is a 4-day workweek, great.

BetGames recently renewed its contract with STS to offer a wide range of card games to Polish players. How do you evaluate the cooperation so far? After all, you have already been working together for more than 5 years.

One of the best partnerships I’ve experienced so far. Brilliant team that is intrinsically motivated to push things, straight forward communication, absolutely amazing.

Will the cooperation with STS differ from the one you had before? Maybe you are planning to introduce new products specifically for the Polish market?

We will not disclose the plans we have together.

The online casino and card games industry is growing rapidly. What plans do you have for the future to remain a competitive player?

We are not ashamed to admit that we are an underdog. This isn’t a disadvantage, as it forces you to reinvent yourself permanently. We don’t have the leverage of the multi-billion competitors, but this gives us the advantage to be more selective and work closely with our top partners – they always get the A-team! Single games can push you 20-30%+ in a year, and we are confident that with our new RGS platform that will not only host RNG but also live games, we will be able to speed up our concept to cash time, offer operators unique “experimental” content and double the business in the next 3 years again. The only thing in our control that can truly hold us back is if we fall into complacency. We keep stretching and increasing the pace.