Gextech have been in the business of providing interactive gaming content since 2003, when the company was founded by Group Chairman Mark Campbell. Utilising his telecommunications background, Campbell saw how some of his skills and those of his colleagues could be an asset in providing gaming content across multiple platforms, and the end result is Gextech.

The company’s key product is Fantastic League, a football game which has the potential to make a healthy profit for casino operators, broadcasters, online vendors… the potential is near limitless, all it needs is for the product to capture the imagination of the player. The game allows players to bet on most of the things they can in a live football match, but over a league season; the duration of the season is dictated by the medium, with a TV broadcast of, for example, two hours a day over seven days compared to a fraction of that time on the internet. Fantastic League is due to hit screens in the UK and Ireland this Autumn after the company sealed a deal with broadcaster Sky – but expect it to be everywhere, soon.

Gextech has big plans for their football brand and they are rightly proud of their achievement. Jon Bruford met with Mark Campbell and the company’s Commercial Director, Marc Campman to find out more.

Casino International: Where are you based?

Mark Campbell: We have two development offices, which are Malaga and Barcelona in Spain, then we have our office in London which is the main sales office because the UK is the second biggest gaming and gambling market in the world after the US – and finally, our offices in the US. We decided that in order to tend to our clients’ needs better, we should have our sales offices in those big markets.

CI: Is Spain the base simply because that’s where you’ve been based in the past, or is there some other reason?

M Campbell: I used to be in the oil business, and I was very fortunate to be a partner in a very successful company in Antwerp, Belgium, and I retired at 33 and went to live in Spain. To be honest, I got bored after a couple of years and went into telecomms, which was just at the start of the telecomms boom, and I was fortunate enough to make quite a bit of money in those 10 years. With the incubator company, gaming looked attractive because we had the experience and the expertise in some of my programmers for handling multi-transactional large gaming systems. The key for us was that we understood the technology, but we didn’t come from a gaming background; when we started building our platform for mobile, we realised the same technology could be used in video slot machines, which was of course the new thing in casinos and pubs, replacing the old mechanical slots. We’ve also developed and had on the Spanish market – with a major gaming company – our games in their slot machines. We also wrote the operating system for their machine, which is also distributed in the UK now.

CI: Tell me something of the company – what is the philosophy behind setting it up, what do you hope to achieve?

M Campbell: I set the company up about three and a half years ago. The reason for that was because I come from a telecomms background, and had been involved in a number of very successful telecomms companies, all based in Spain, including Jazztel, which was an operator we started with $3million and took it to a $7.5billion corporation in three years, and was one of the most successful launches of any company on the NASDAQ. Then I took a year off to decide what I wanted to do, so I created an incubator company, from which I launched four new businesses and one of those was Gextech. I was personally fascinated with mobile technology and the future of wireless technology. Coming from a telecomms background I could see an enormous opportunity to produce a gaming platform for mobile, in the gaming world with secure communication between mobile telephones and servers, and the business model of gaming attracted me much more than the traditional model of downloading games and tunes into the mobile for a fixed revenue. Obviously gaming would open up the opportunity to a constant flow of information between the mobile and the servers. Also, the content we’re giving free to the user because he has to pay to play. It’s going to be an ongoing transactional situation once clients are signed up and using a platform. This is something we already have experience with thanks to our telecomms background.

CI: Why aim for the cross-platform product, as you’re doing with Fantastic League? Is that not incredibly complex?

M Campbell: Where we’re coming from, we see it as delivering a game across all platforms to the end user. My vision of a slot machine is very different to what you see in a slot machine today; you should be able to go to a slot machine and look at a video game on a video screen, and technology would allow you today – if legislation permitted it – you could download that game directly into your mobile phone. Just point your phone at the slot machine, via BlueTooth or infra-red and download a version of it into your telephone, walk out of the pub or casino and keep playing a mobile version of that slot machine. We have slot games that are available on a video slot and a mobile telephone.

CI: What’s the main breadwinner for the company?

M Campbell: Through the slots we’re also developing work because the media allows us to do a lot of three-dimensional content. We look very much at also doing virtual sports events, because it became obvious in the betting world that one of the most successful betting products is of course sports. That’s what drives betting, and we saw there was a very successful horse racing simulator out on the market, and we looked at football. We couldn’t understand as football is the most popular sport in the world, why there wasn’t a virtual football game. We discovered the reason for that is because it’s very complex. It’s one thing to program eight horses to run around a virtual oval track, it’s another thing entirely to program virtual footballers to play a football match and get them all to behave as they should do on a football pitch, scoring goals, winning games and such.

CI: How have you made your football game sufficiently random, then, to inspire player confidence in its realism?

M Campbell: We’ve come up with a solution, which has been presented to the industry already, both at GIGSE and back at ICE earlier this year. The key for any company like ourselves is our random number generators, the software that drives those is the core of what we are. This is our Coca-Cola formula, is how those engines actually work. Each gaming operator jealously guards his secrets. Though the technology is fairly well understood, actually developing that and putting it into practise is far more complex. What we’ve done in football is something unique, and I use that word not lightly; no-one else has it, no-one else has ever done this before, it’s an absolute first.

CI: What’s the first step for your virtual football game? How will the target market see it for the first time?

M Campbell: We announced a deal with Sky, who have taken our virtual football game to exclusively broadcast it on satellite TV in the UK. That will be launched probably in Autumn 2006 with Sky, and they are very excited about this product. It’s taken us nearly three years to develop, with a team of 50 programmers working on it and millions being invested in it.

Marc Campman, Communications Director: Fantastic League, the football product, is very much the flagship product of Gextech, and as Mark said our intent is to make the virtual content on multiple platforms. So we have it on broadcast, with Sky who will have it on Sky Vegas Live, we’ll have it on the internet, so we can stream that content to betting web sites, and we’ll be having it on mobile as well, and machines – so it’s truly about content delivery, regardless of platform, so the operator can maximise their revenue from the virtual football content.

CI: What are the problems with working across so many platforms?

M Campman: I don’t think the channel is much of an issue compared to developing the game; once you have that content in a certain format, it generates video output. For broadcast you stream it directly from into a studio. Once you have the video output you then transform it to streaming, into whatever format the operator is working with. The main issue is with the bandwidth. That means how much content can you supply? What’s the format of the delivery from the operator? For instance, on Sky matches will be three minutes and Sky will have an introduction for each match with half-time and post-match analysis. Teams are part of a league so there would be 12 matches, each of about seven minutes with analysis. Within a week, with seven days of broadcasting of two hours a day, Sky can broadcast an entire season of games in one week, so people can bet not just on who’s going to win the match, score a goal – and on who will be relegated or promoted. Because of the channel you’re using, in this case TV, the delivery format is is key in formulating. Internet is different – people are unlikely to watch seven days in the same league, so you want to run that in a much faster time frame, as the internet is a much faster medium. So we took the same content, same technology behind it, but we condensed the league into two hours. Instead of running each match simultaneously, we actually run a full round in the competition – ie a full weekend of play – in seven minutes. You can then play the full league in two hours, it’s a different application of the content given the technology channel you’re using. Mobile is likely to be faster again, and what we’re doing at the moment is defining the format for the mobile.

CI: The games you have developed for slots, are you focussed mainly on Spain with that or are you branching wider?

M Campman: We’ve developed those games specifically for our Spanish client. The majority of our current output is on two areas – one is Fantastic League, to make it available across all those platforms including slots but not restricted to Spain, and the second area is mobile where we’re looking at the lottery market, and having a number of mobile lottery games for a mobile lottery operator to support and enhance their lottery shows. That’s the main emphasis of the business at the moment.

CI: How do you see the company growing? What’s the plan?

M Campman: We want to be seen in the market as a content provider of virtual events, and we want to be seen as a leader in that, so when you think virtual sports events, you think Gextech. Our first virtual sports event is, as mentioned, football. The fact that we started with football is a great advantage to us because we started with the most complicated sport. From here, it will only be easier for us. In the US, we might do ice hockey or American football. So we want to be seen as the leader in virtual content to operators, and the potential is enormous. We are unique and there is nobody out there with this technology. If someone started developing competition to us today, it would take at least 18 months to come up with something that could compete with us, so there’s a clear first-to-market advantage. We want the product to be available globally, which is why we’re already looking to develop our commercial bases, now that the development centre is ready. We believe the technology is one important part of the product, but the branding is also very important and will truly make it work. Fantastic League is ours. As a name, as a global brand, it can sit perfectly with the Champions League, the Premiership, La Liga, and for virtual football is Fantastic League. We’re selling the league to the operators as a standard franchise. So Sky is going to broadcast it as the Fantastic League; other operators are going to launch it as the Fantastic League; there is a web site, fantasticleague.com which is the virtual football community we’re trying to build. The success of the product and its technology is also going to be driven by the global adoption of the Fantastic League as a brand, which could have a ripple effect to other products like Fantastic Racing, Fantastic Hockey or whatever. The branding of this concept is very important. We’ve had to be very tough with some operators, who wanted the game as a white label service. We had to say ‘It’s not going to work as a white label – the opportunity we have here together is to create a global brand of virtual football.’

CI: So it’s a one-time development, then you have to simply grow the brand. Is there any potential for licensing it? For example, if the Premier League wanted to do a version?

M Campman: You take those opportunities as they arise, if they arise. One of the problems we’ve had, of course, is that we can’t use names of teams or names of players. Once you start talking to the Premiership, you’re talking about a lot of money to use these names and imagery, and they have very stringent requirements on their use. The options are obviously massive though. It’s all about the marketing, with that in mind. Now that we have the technology, how are we going to successfully market this product and how are we going to build this Fantastic League brand out there? There are various approaches you can take: stick to your franchise formula, or for example make it global community and put together a kind of World Cup tournament, a European Cup tournament – it’s just about creating a real world in the virtual environment. In the real world, there are sports icons and football icons – I can do exactly the same thing in the virtual world. For example, look at Lara Croft. I could create a Lara Croft in the virtual league, or a David Beckham. By having this virtual community, you have the virtual power to create this excitement. Football is about passion and excitement, and we need to use everything we can in the virtual world to create this passion.

CI: But in creating an icon, you might not capture what the fans love – look at how the fans were with Steve McManaman at Real Madrid compared to David Beckham or Ronaldo, for example. They loved McManaman sincerely, but he’s not the global icon Ronaldo or Beckham are. How will you approach this and keep depth in the game?

M Campman: This is the stage we’re at right now with the game – making it as real as possible. It’s great to create a number of moves and let 22 players run around the pitch, but if you haven’t got the tactics in place that make those people run around, if you haven’t got action in the game where someone dribbles up front and draws defenders away... That’s the kind of gameplay the football diehards want to see. That’s the icing on the cake, that we’re working on at the moment, to make the gameplay as realistic as possible within the random number generation we use. There are three elements that make up the game. Number one, there’s the random number generator, which randomly generates the outcome of the match: who is going to score, when is he going to score, are there any yellow cards, all the different betting options you have in a football match is being generated. The second component is the Coca-Cola secret, and the third component is a huge database of moves, of players doing different actions, kicking, fouling, heading, all the different moves any player might do. The part in the middle is called SmartStitch. Based on the desired outcome, it generates a script for that three-minute match. It says: ‘If I need to have that goal scored by that person at that time, I need to do this, this, this and this.’ It storyboards the match, then draws together the different elements from the different modules in the library and stitches them together.

CI: If any player can perform all the moves, surely it’s not a realistic depiction of a game? Wingers and forwards are generally more skillful than defenders, for example, but they’ll all be picking from the same library of moves according to the result SmartStitch has to realise.

M Campman: What you’re talking about there is probability. The betting operator can set different probablities for a particular player or a particular team. We’ve added that layer to the game so the operator can make one team slightly stronger, or to have greater likelihood of winning the league, or make one player more likely to score. That’s how you could create your Ronaldinhos in the game – it’s not preplanned in the game, that’s on the operator’s side.

CI: With a product like this, it’s surely just a question of it capturing the attention of players, then the sky is the limit.

M Campman: I have never, ever seen a product like this before, which is truly unique combined with the branding opportunity we have here. At GIGSE, the response was phenomenal, which is a good sign. The companies we’re talking to and their preparedness to sign up is a good indication that this is going to fly.

CI: Which territories are you looking at selling into first?

M Campman: We have a world map and we’re putting flags on different territories. Of course, we’re dealing with the right to broadcast and the rights for the internet, and for mobile. Europe, obviously, the Middle East are very interested... The US is less interested at the moment, but the potential is there for a follow-on product. Asia are very keen as well, but priority- wise we’re really looking at Europe. With Sky we have the UK and Ireland covered with broadcast, but we’re looking to Scandinavia, we’re talking to Germany, Spain, Italy... Within 12 months, we should be able to get full coverage.

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