Enterra Holdings, Inc changed to EvenBet Gaming in 2015 with refocused attention on marketing and market research and since then there has been no looking back for the software development brand. With operations in markets like Asia, India, Latin America, and parts of Europe, EvenBet Gaming is now trying to strengthen its foothold in the US.
The company has also reduced its custom development operations to focus wholeheartedly on poker development. According to CEO, Dmitry Starostenkov, EvenBet Gaming is now looking at expansions and providing clients with holistic turnkey online gaming solutions.
“We are now purely a poker development company and online gaming company. We are no more into software development projects. Headquartered in Malta, We have a hundred people in the development team in Russia and a support and sales team in the United States of America. In all these years we have launched about 200 odd projects for poker around the world out of which more than 100 are still operational. We would continue to grow in our predominant markets but we are also keen on investing our time and resources in the US and make the most of the opening market,” said Starostenkov.
The brand according to Starostenkov has come a long way from its first basic version of poker game.
“In all these years we have added more than 30 games into our portfolio and it’s not only poker but also other games like rummy and others. Right now we have about 35 different games in our portfolio. Recently, we released Call Break for the Indian market and we’d like to continue the spree of coming up with newer games across the board,” he said.
On other hand Starostenkov mentioned they do not want to stay restricted to developing games only.
“Our aim is to supply to our customers a turnkey solution where they get only games but also a gaming platform from us that cares about players, their profiles, payments, fraud management, marketing tools, anti-fraud, etc. So like our proposition for the market right now consists of two big plans. One of them is games and the other is online gaming platforms,” he said.
The brand is also working on maintaining an open architecture and reselling for third-party content providers through their platform which includes the likes of sports betting, casual games, casino games, skill games, and others.
Coming to India, Starostenkov said their key focus in the market is to provide clients skill-based games keeping in mind the law of the land. The market according to home will continue to be one of their key markets because of its sheer growth potential in the next five to ten years.
“We believe in helping our customers in India with holistic solutions providing them both games and gaming platforms. We also have clients where we supply the games and we integrate it into our customers’ platform by API like in the case of MPL,” he said.
Talking about his plans and observations about the country Starostenkov said factors like population, emerging economy, high penetration of mobile connectivity, and others make India a market with promise; however, poker has seen two clearly distinctive phases in the country.
The first phase according to him began in 2015-2016 where poker was booming with early adopters taking to the game but the growth stagnated after touching a couple of millions in terms of the user base.
“All the platforms started to fight for the same user base and marketing became expensive because they were trying to get players from other competitors and not engage fresh players. However, in the second phase with platforms like MPL, etc, a fresh focus on multi-gaming platforms started to engage new players in other games like fantasy games, etc in the same platform where they also had the option to try rummy or poker. This was a fresh start for the poker industry where players no longer needed to fight for the same user base and concentrated on getting new players on board at lower marketing and customer acquisition costs,” he said.
This also helps in building a balanced ecosystem of professional players and new players where both are in a win-win situation, Starostenkov said.
Balanced ecosystem apart according to Starostenkov another big factor that can help the online gaming industry grow is blockchain technology.
“I see two trends which will be opened by blockchain technology for online gaming. One is using blockchain cryptocurrencies for payments in online gaming because banking systems are becoming more and more complicated and are getting more and more regulated by governments across the globe. This is making the online gaming industry suffer. Trend number two is using blockchain technology to create a fair play game. Using blockchain as an integral part of gameplay would allow players to audit and check transactions anytime and be sure that the operator doesn’t indulge in any fraud,” he said.
