Alex Czajkowski podcast transcript
Interview with Alex Czajkowski of eGaming 2.0
RT: Ronan Tighe
AC: Alex Czajkowski
RT: Hi, I’m Ronan Tighe, and this week I’m joined by Alex Czajkowski from eGaming 2.0, who’s just released a new casino called Buzzluck. First of all, I’d like to ask you Alex, a little bit about your background and eGaming 2.0.
AC: All right, I appreciate taking the time to have this chat, Ronan. Let me see, where do we begin? I guess it all started in 1979 when I got my first email address, or was it 1978 when I started programming Basic? Anyway, 30 years later it’s still a matter of taking innovations and bringing them to the market really. We went into, the most interesting times were the dot.com phase, when I joined QXL.com, the first online auction. From there I went into venture capitalism, and with the venture capital firm I kept on coming up with ideas for branded digital transactions, and it occurred to me that there were really three industries that this technology would apply in: one would be finance, one would be insurance, and the last one would be online gaming. Well, given the choice of three, I went for online gaming, and I joined Kerzner Interactive, and we did Casino Atlantis, one of the first online casinos to come out of the Isle of Man jurisdiction. Then we did some work for betinternet before getting recruited by Sportingbet to do their Americas region, and that was a lot of fun, four years at Costa Rica, we did some super brands, Sportsbook.com for one, and Players Only, which for me was a template, was a test of what happens if you add a Web 2.0 broadband friendly Flash movie video interface to a fairly standard, and kind of old and not state of the art game platforms, and the results were very encouraging, and their site grew fantastically well very quickly, became profitable very quickly, and I wanted to take that and take it worldwide. The company I was with wasn’t able to expand internationally like that, for various reasons, so I set up on my own in Malta, mainly because we like Malta, and started working on Buzzluck. Six months later, and three months late, and a couple of hundred thousand pounds over budget, we launched Buzzluck on March 13th.
RT: How did you go about launching the site?
AC: Well, it’s been fairly soft actually, because well the first three months of an online casino, you need to be careful anyway, because there all out to get you – there are advantage players that come in and put a comb through your t and cs and try to find a weaknesses and try to find weaknesses in your systems and try to find weaknesses in your security and your fraud, and so we’ve got this site up and running, using PR, using social networking of course to get the word out, and then we’re also levering our affiliate system and our affiliate network, which has been fantastic. If you go to sites like Casinomeister and look up Buzzluck, you’ll see people talking about us, talking about our product, and most importantly talking really positively about the service that they get with Buzzluck.
RT: With Buzzluck, it’s a very interesting angle you’re taking, it’s a lot more entertainment-driven – can you tell us a little bit about that, and the strategy behind that?
AC: Oh absolutely, Buzzluck is largely inspired by Steve Wynn’s activities in Las Vegas. In 1999 he founded the Mirage, which was a complete change from the Stardust gamble joints that were happening on the Strip and down in Fremont Street as well downtown. What he did was reach out to make a more, with the Mirage he built what was at the time the most expensive hotel casino complex ever done, and he needed to make a million dollars a day just to pay off his seven year construction loan, so he throws this volcano up in the front that goes off every half an hour, 45 minutes; he has this special live show with live animals for a couple of hours every night, and the punters started coming, they came in to the point where he paid off his construction loan in 18 months, so with that, with the experience of Players Only, and the success of that site, combined with Steve Wynn’s experience of going from the biggest 1.0 to the biggest 2.0, effectively changing the focus, the face and the fortunes of Las Vegas, we were encouraged to take Buzzluck and do the same kind of thing. Buzzluck not only has an online casino and all the instant play games and 120 download games, all available right from the home page, you don’t have to do anything other than go to the home page if you don’t want to, just like every other online casino site in the world, but if you care to, if you’re looking for something else, if you want to be entertained a little bit more than the games, you can go into our 3D lobby, and there you run into a variety of characters, people that you would possibly see in the lobby of a fancy hotel casino. Or you can go into our live lounge, and our live lounge is a live video streamed show that goes for three hours, Thursday through Sunday nights, and you can interact with the host of that show in real time, and some people never go to them, they just download the casino, or just go and play their favourite game from the home page; other people love it, and they’re in the lobby and chasing around the lobby, you move like a first person shooter through the 3D lobby, or they go and they hang out in the lounge, and they hang out in the lounge for hours, and we give all kinds of cash prizes in the lounge, and there’s also cash bonuses hidden in the lobby, so we use the product to help sell the product as well, but it’s totally optional entertainment, it’s not required to go through there.
RT: And you’ve a very engaging ECRM policy – a little bit about that?
AC: Indeed, customer communications is very important, I really believe that we’ve moved from a less of a marketing driven space, and more of a one-to-one sales space, so we use marketing to get the word out, and get the conviction, or the comprehension, of what we’re all about, we use marketing for that, but then we really shift into a one-to-one sales base. We don’t have customer support people, we have player development people, and these people proactively follow your account and your activities, and they’re there, if they see you’re having a deposit problem, they can step into help you; if you’re a withdrawal issue, they can help you with that; they do personalised bonuses – it’s a very very personalised service, and so far, again if you look at Casinomeister, you’ll find people are loving it, they’re getting a level of attention and care that they’ve never seen from an online casino before, and we think that this will help retain those customers far far longer than the failures that you’ve seen of some of the big name online casinos.
RT: Who’s your target audience?
AC: Anyone who speaks English and has money in their pocket, and broadband – and are not in the US, or Turkey. So we are really appealing to, well two kinds of audiences right now: the traditional online casino audience, who are loving the service and loving the games; and then we’re also appealing to guys that have never heard about it, looked at a casino before, and they’ve come to Buzzluck for the show or to check out the 3D lobby, and then they, “Oh, you know what? I want to play blackjack, I just want to try these slot machines” – off we go. So there’s really two different groups, and therefore our demographics are all over the map as well, the online casino player is typically over 40 these days, whereas you see this 18 – 34 poker kind of profile, and wishing a mix of those kinds of people; they’re coming from England, they’re coming from Canada, but they’re coming from Finland and Germany and Italy and Israel as well, so players from all over the world, and we like just a wide range of ages, so it’s a very interesting mix.
RT: And how are you involving them in the development of the site?
AC: Everything that we’ve done has been driven in part by input from users, we extensively use user surveys, Catriona would be very proud of us I think for that! Even the name Buzzluck, we tested that extensively against a host of other names last summer before settling on it – it was our first choice all along, and it’s nice to be proven right effectively, but we were open-minded to not going with Buzzluck and using a different name, but the survey said yes, Buzzluck is the one that most players can see themselves playing at, yadayada. We have been pursuing a mobile casino offering, and we’ve decided not to now, we’ve just decided to shelve that, because the survey says – no-one gives a shit, they might try it, they might be interested in it, but the desire’s not really there, and there’s lots of reasoning behind that in terms of the total experience and the total experience that you can get through your mobile phone or your PDA, but it seems to me to be compelling that you’re not going to get a Buzzluck experience, so let’s not go there at this time.
RT: So is there anything that you’re hearing from your users that they want?
AC: Well, I think, we went as an online casino space because it’s one of the most underserved areas, it’s the oldest area for online gaming in many dimensions, but it’s also, for all the players and all the competition in it, nobody seems to be doing a really crackerjack job worldwide, Europe-wide, everywhere but the US, and I don’t know if the US is particularly well served either, for that matter. There are some people that are doing better than others, but we really thought that we’d come on with this entertainment brand, we’d come on with these other diversions, the live lounge and the 3D lobby, and we’d come on with a proactive player development strategy for ECRM, we’d really be doing something different, and that would be ultimately very successful and uniquely differentiated in the market, and I think we’ve succeeded in all those counts actually with Buzzluck.
RT: What do you think has been the biggest innovations in the last five years in the gaming industry?
AC: It’s not an industry known for its innovation, as I often complain about in my blog and articles and whatnot; Ladbrokes set the pace with the single wallet solution quite a few years ago, and then dropped the ball, and they picked the ball back up again, and dropped the ball again, but that was the right kind of thing to do, diversifying games for their player base and having a single wallet, that’s absolutely the right thing to do, and that was innovation at the time. Since then, what have you seen? Well, Betfair of course, they’re great at innovation, finally gave the high street some competition for prices, particularly in the horse racing, and then so they’ve had good experience there, they still need to innovate with their user interface and improve that, I think, but the premise, the underlying project is, or the underlying processes is very innovative from Betfair, so fair play to that. I’ve been a fan of PKR since it came out, it’s not poker as you know it, it’s a different game altogether, and people playing it are playing a game above and beyond poker, with poker at its heart, and they’ve found great success when opening poker up to another market, which is a very good thing, so fair play to all those guys along all those lines.
RT: Why do you think the industry hasn’t been as innovative as it could and really need to be?
AC: Well, I think it’s largely run by bean counters, who are less likely to risk their revenues by trying different things, they know what’s work, they’ll stay with that, and that’s not a bad thing, except it does limit the growth of the industry and it does limit the appeal of the industry, because they’re not trying new things, they’re not pushing out there. They are doing some, even the older players are doing things like diversifying their game base and going more B2B to offer these game bases to land based guys, and so that all makes good sense, and bringing in branded games and other softer games, it all makes sense. None of them are great big super hits that are going to change the face of the industry, but it is some progress, and they are spending money on that, so fair play to them for that. Even Microgaming came out with their MySlot personalised slot thing, which is something I’d been talking about to various people, including them, over the past couple of years, and I haven’t seen much of it since then, because I think it’s probably a lot of work, but it’s moving in the right direction, but very slowly, I think the online casino industry is tad moribund and our customer base is ageing rapidly, and I hate to see us go the route of the US horseracing industry, where all of a sudden everybody’s dead, and there’s no-one to sell to any more, so the innovation and diversification of the kind of game base, it’s going to make a difference.
RT: What games in the future, or what innovations, do you see that will change the experience for users?
AC: Well, for me it’s about online video, it’s not necessarily about changing the games, we had this big debate about that – do we want to do Sims in the casino? – a 3D casino where you walk round as an avatar and you can talk to other … and we looked long and hard at that, and decided not to do that, we figured that players want a game that they’re already familiar with, just like at the Mirage, he didn’t change the games, you could be playing blackjack in the Mirage or at Caesars or Rio, and you’ve got your head down – it doesn’t really matter where you’re playing; you look up – now you get a different experience, now you get a different level of service, depending where you’re at, but the game itself is the same and good, a good positive experience. So we decided not to go that route, rather we wanted to go for online video, and make the site as interactive video as possible, so we have Zoe, who greets you when you get there; which, people have been doing that for years, I did it in 2004 for the first time with Sportsbook.com, we had Brooke Burke come up on the home page, she was a famous American model. Other people have since followed that route, doing those kinds of things, but now we’ve got a total interactive video user interface, where you can ask our hostess about anything, and you can also, when you go into the live lounge, that’s live streaming video, where you can chat with the guy. So for me, it’s video video video and the incorporation of video more into games and more into the brands is what I think we’re going to see a lot more of.
RT: What attributes do you think make a good site?
AC: Well, let’s see … that’s an interesting question. If you look at where the popular sites are today, there’s the ability of the user to have some control over what’s happening on the site and contribute to the site and participate with the site. We offer that through the live lounge, where you can chat with the guy. You’ve got Facebook, where it’s a networking utility where people can talk to their other friends and whatnot, and we’re not trying to build that into Buzzluck at all; we may well release things soon that will connect to your Facebook account, so you can share things that way, but we’re not trying to replicate the Facebook functionality, that would be a waste of time. For me, it’s really the – you want something that’s entertaining and immersive, I mean online casino playing is all about escape really, it’s about getting away, relaxing for half an hour, an hour, playing your slot machines, playing cards – it’s an immersive environment where you’re just focused on the games that you’re playing, and you don’t distract from that when you’re playing the games, and I think that’s the kind of environment you need to provide. What most online casino sites do is they provide you with that by virtue of their download casino, and so you have to download it and off you go. We’re doing it online because we are online now.
RT: Lastly, we were at the eGaming Power 50 Conference a couple of days ago – did you meet anyone or hear anything that particularly interests you?
AC: Well, the Managing Director from Microsoft said all the same things I’m saying about video, and that’s always reassuring, the fact that the future of online is video, and it’s up to new gaming sites to embrace that appropriately, it’s something that we’re very much doing. We’re about to come out with Buzzluck bingo, we’ll be coming out with that in the next couple of months anyway, and we’re actually working on another bingo site for another one of our customers that will be largely video driven as well. So for me, the Power 50, the bits of it I remember, as anyone who was there, would like me not remember all of it, it was a great meeting, a really great session and a really good time spent, I think. But that was what impressed me the most.
RT: Alex, thanks for your time – I really found the interview interesting, I’m sure our audience will too.
AC: Thanks Ronan.