CryptoLogic employs about 400 staff across four offices, in London, Toronto, Vancouver and Cyprus. Around 200 of those are based in the Toronto development offices where the creative software is created. The company is a full service provider for internet poker and casino sites, right down to the financial transactions.

Casino International: Are there any geographic regions CryptoLogic works in particularly?

Justin Thouin: We’re very selective with whom we partner, we take the view that we want our software to only exist on sites that are very exclusive and are what we call ‘blue chip’ providers. So we have very stringent requirements for groups with whom we partner. So Intercasino, who are largely thought to be the leading online casino in the online space, for example, have been voted top online casino for the past five years by a number of publications. They operate in seven different languages, offer a US dollar casino, a pound sterling casino, and seven different Euro casinos. So it works in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese. Other partners include William Hill and Littlewoods, so we have a very strong UK presence. About 70% of our revenue comes from International sources, while 30% was coming from the United States – but we’ve taken a proactive view to no longer accept bets from US players as a result of the legislation that passed.

CI: The US legislation is going to have some knock-on effect on a lot of people – smaller shareholders of these online gaming companies, not to mention the staff they directly employ. How have you dealt with what’s happened?

JT: There’s been regulatory uncertainty in the United States for the past 10 years, where the House of Representatives as well as the Senate have endeavoured to make online gambling illegal and they finally succeeded. So we take the view that the United States now views online casinos and online poker as explicitly illegal and therefore being a company being traded on three major stock exchanges – the NASDAQ, the Toronto Stock Exchange and the London Stock Exchange – we respect their views and we are no longer accepting bets from US players. So the good news is that we have, in light of the fact that there has been regulatory uncertainty, we have taken the view to put a high priority on international expansion. And we are in the enviable position of having 70% of our revenue coming from outside of the United States, so we can fall back on that. And we are excited at the prospects of focussing on international opportunities. We have a number of different ways in which we’ve stopped players from specific countries playing. We have an entire department that’s responsible for that. We can say with confidence that no new US players and no existing US players are able to play any more on Cryptologic’s licensee sites. It’s quite an easy thing to do for us.

CI: The Intercasino site is very interesting, with the Marvel licenses you’ve got under your wing. It’s a great idea that should appeal to the newer generation of gamblers as they grew up with some of these licenses at the cinema, in comic books et cetera.

JT: Yes we’re really proud of that. When I joined the company one of my major initiatives was to improve our slots portfolio, and we believe now that we have the best slots in the industry. When you look at the land-based industry there’s a lot of licensing partnerships between slot companies and brands, so we went out and tried to seek some of the leading consumer brands in the world, hence we have a longterm relationship with Marvel. We have 10 games currently released, three of which came out in October, with titles like ‘The Hulk’, ‘X-Men’, ‘Blade’, ‘Daredevil’, and ‘Silver Surfer’, now supplemented with ‘Ghost Rider’, ‘Electra’ and ‘Iron Man’. They are titles loved by players around the world, have a massive following and also have movies associated with them to further their exposure. We also partner with a number of casual game companies to bring out products such as ‘Bejewelled’, which is the most wellknown casual game in the world.

CI: That’s a PopCap game, isn’t it? They’re a wellknown online casual gaming company. They have an impressive library – if you can tap into the popularity of Bejewelled, the rest of their library could yield some very interesting, very different online slots.

JT: We see a mass of opportunity in the casual game space. Bejewelled was our first foray into it. We’ve released a slot version of Cubis, which came out in October, and Cubis is another phenomenally well known game, over seven million people per month enjoy the Cubis game. With that, we believe we’ve been able to create a unique slot game that the world has never seen before. The great thing about Cubis, and about Bejewelled, is that they both have unique spinning mechanisms so it’s not just your normal 9 or 20 line slot. It’s something entirely new the players haven’t seen before, and we anticipate it’s going to be massively well received as Bejewelled has been. So we are very focussed on innovation, we want to innovate and create firsts in the casino industry whether that’s partnering with major brands like Marvel or creating never-seen-before spinning mechanisms for Cubis and Bejewelled, or offering the largest jackpot in online gaming history, a millionaires club which is currently at £4.5 million. Or offering the Marvel jackpot, which for the first three level jackpots players can not only win regular prizes but three different jackpots. We try to innovate; we have bonus levels that play like video games. You reach a bonus in The Hulk video slot and you become Hulk and you need to destroy tanks, and helicopters and laboratories. So we’re really creating an entertaining experience, a substitute for movies or reading books or you know, or watching television. So if a player wins or loses they can still feel happy playing with us because they’ve had an entertaining experience.

CI: Is that where you create value for both vendor and player – vendor because you keep the player on for longer, and player because they are actually entertained while they play and feel they get real value for maoney rather than just a couple of spins.

JT: We are very focussed on meeting and exceeding players expectations, we spend a great deal of money on player research each and every year to find out exactly what they want. Every single slot game we develop is different from another. We do not clone games, we want each and every game to have a new and unique experience, and we want people to be entertained and delighted to win money. But also by the entertainment factor. Every game we go through in painstaking detail to make sure that every graphic that every animation, every sound is the highest quality it can be. We believe that our games stand far above the competition. We endeavour for the players, for our licensees to think ‘you know, I’ve no reason to play anywhere else other than licensees that have Cryptologic software because they give me the best value for my money. I come away feeling the most entertained, I have the most fun, and they’re always giving me something new that exceeds my expectations. I never know what to expect, they’re always coming up with things fresh and novel that I’ve never seen before.’ And Bonus Pack 10, which is the next big release of new games, is really, we think, going to be revolutionary in the online casino industry. We have so many different themes and so many types of games coming out. If you look at ‘Frightmare Jackpot Slots’ we’ve created, we saw that there were no really scary games online, and since these games were released around Halloween, we decide to create games which are really actually quite scary and that will thrill users. We also offer, for people that prefer them, both male and female adult slots. We’ve partnered with ‘Thunder from Down Under’ who is a male revue show in Las Vegas to create a game for females, with very attractive men, and then we’ve done a game called the ‘Mystique Club’ which is a game with very attractive females. Of course, gambling and sex are two things that go together quite well, and we’ve married them in those two games.

CI: When you’re coming up with the next license or the next original game do you have a set demographic in mind. I mean, is there a typical Cryptologic user out there?

JT: We do a lot of player research with the set so we have a great deal of information on our players. It’s a pretty broad demographic, generally lies between the ages of 25 and 49, about 50/50 male to female, and our players tend to be very savvy, very web savvy, have higher than average education, have higher than average income and are professionally employed. So we are looking at people who are intelligent, who have an expendable income, who are web savvy and really who expect and demand the best. They’re coming to play the Cryptologic licensee because they expect and demand the best, and if they are going to spend their disposable income, they want to get the most entertainment for it.

CI: What does the future hold for the company?

JT: Cryptologic is going to continue to innovate and push the envelope of casino gaming beyond what we’ve seen so far and beyond what our competitors have to offer. Our goal is to be the number one casino gaming provider in the world and to offer players entertainment they can’t find anywhere else. It’s that mission that we take into every project we undertake.

Printer friendly version

Email this article to a friend