In this interview with CalvinAyre.com’s Becky Liggero, Matt Davey of NYX Gaming Group gives a company update and shares how the company innovates their offerings.
Game developers and operators most of the time associate the word innovation with either of two things: go big or be flashy.
Questions like “what’s the next great thing,” “how are you going to change the product” or “how are you going to make something different” pop out during brainstorming sessions.
There will probably be one guy in the meeting who will blurt out: “Can we get 3D holographic games to jump out of the screen?”
Matt Davey of NYX Gaming Group, however, believes the market doesn’t need flashy ideas in order to produce innovative offerings. What operators should do, according to Davey, is simply go back to the basics.
“The market needs great quality products. We think just doing the basics, making certain the platform works well, that it scales, it’s always up, making sure that you have all the access to the game content,” Davey told CalvinAyre.com “Doing all that hygiene stuff and adding on some interesting stuff around that, that’s what we’re focused on.”
Davey disclosed that NYX is has been busy with acquisitions and possible mergers in the future, including with gaming technology firm Scientific Games.
US-based games developer Sci Games announced late last week that it had acquired 36% of NYX’s outstanding ordinary shares. Davey said that NYX is already providing Sci-Games with scale in the online digital space.
“We took the company public three years ago, it feels less than that. We’ve bought seven businesses over that time. So we’ve got quite experience with the mergers and acquisitions model. The drivers behind that are around scale and product. We think those drivers stay,” he said. “The recent transactions achieve that for Scientific Games. We provide them scale in the online digital space. They already had a position real money wagering with their RGS for instance but we can bring forward the scale that we have in our OGS product, the 200 customers we can reach, and we add on the sports wagering side of the business. So again, this transaction underwrites the fact that scale and size and product depth matters.”
Davey also noted the importance of leaving operational people alone while they do the transactions so things will run smoothly as possible during mergers and acquisitions.
“Obviously, going through the seven transactions we’ve executed at a smaller level, as well as going through this transaction, it is important not to distract the operational people from doing it. We spent six months working our three-year strategic plan,” he said. “And out of that rolled a number of tasks and activities that we have all our team focused on doing. We manage to quarantine them from the whole process so they will have their eyes focused on that.”
