In the lab with Playtech

Playtech is a beast of great technical proportions made up of many moving parts. And while Europe’s biggest supplier of online gambling technology is frequently featured within the pages of all industry publications, to chance upon information on the inner workings of its smaller and more niche business arms is much less common.

One such facet of the business is Playtech Innovation Labs, a Gibraltar-based subsidiary that was established upon the closure of mobile platform and games provider Odobo in 2016. When the firm became defunct, Playtech acquired its technology assets and a handful of its staff members, including CTO Peter Mares.

And much to the team’s delight, a number of its nascent product ideas were also transferred over to the Playtech business, which Mares says empowers them with enough freedom to coin and pitch unique product ideas, along with the ability to utilise the firm’s mammoth technology operations.

According to Mares, innovative new technologies are rife at Playtech, particularly in the realms of machine learning and “personalising an operator’s experience”, which he believes is just as integral as personalising the customer’s journey. Mares offers EGR Technology an insight into his laboratory.

EGR Technology: What is the story behind Playtech Innovation Labs?

Peter Mares (PM): When Odobo closed down, Playtech took over the technology assets and the team from the Odobo portfolio. Initially we didn’t have a name; we were just called Odobo. But then we started getting involved in a couple of projects and we started pitching because we were still operating in start-up mode. Some got traction and someone smart within the business decided we were quite innovative.

We were focused on gaming so they just called us the Lab initially. Although there is a team called Innovation Labs it doesn’t mean we’re the only ones doing innovative work in Playtech. I’ve seen evidence of machine learning and AI being applied on real-time monitoring systems so that we can predict when certain data is pointing towards a failure earlier than anything else. My team is responsible for the Marketplace [platform].

We brought the initial concept from Odobo, and then we redesigned the entire product to be able to address Playtech’s opportunity for massive distribution and to tier one clients. With Playtech Open Platform (POP) coming along the line we realised there was a real opportunity to work with operators and new technologies and build something special.

As we have progressed through time, we have also been working through some of the more complicated infrastructural and architectural issues to meet some of these crazy requirements that the world is presenting us with. In a nutshell we have played around in the GPAS [a range of unique content design and development tools for developers] realm and been involved in the POP realm.

Last year at ICE we presented a greenfield proof of concept of what we call virtual cards for the retail system where you can sign in with an Apple passbook. The idea was using something similar to a flight ticket on a mobile at a betting shop, and we built that. It works and it was on show again at this year’s ICE.

Peter Mares is Playtech Innovation Labs’ CTO

That sparked a couple of other thoughts about how to authenticate players across the omni-channel domain. We work quite closely with the retail vertical to build the technology that enables us to take the GPAS content and deploy it into retail machines as well as online. It works and it’s gone into a pilot. The key to innovation is you never know where you might find value. Nowadays there is a lot of focus on using data. I think this year will be a special year when it comes to how much data drives services and how important the data is that we provide our licensees. It’s ultimately about giving players the best tailored products and experiences that anyone can get.

The other thing we are looking at, which is quite close to my heart, is responsible gaming and what can be done that is meaningful and sustainable. Perhaps it is technology, perhaps it’s not just technology. How do we use the tech we have to provide a safer environment for the player?

EGR Technology: Do you think technology should play a major role in responsible gambling initiatives?

PM: I think that technology is the most unbiased approach to responsible gaming. It will only look at facts to identify patterns and it will look at every player and not just the few humans get time to look at. I think technology is a key aspect of reliable and sustainable responsible gaming.

The question we’re grappling with is how to actually shape the technology in such a way that it becomes meaningful and it actually has an impact so we can measure the difference we make to the player. It’s a challenge because we always have to be aware that each time we prevent a player from placing a bet, we are impacting licensees so there is a balance which is one of the most difficult things to tackle.

EGR Technology: Where are you looking in terms of developing responsible gambling technologies?

PM: Ultimately, responsible gaming is a product anyone will offer to protect a player. I believe that there must be an aspect of education and being able to communicate with players at the right time and within the right context. Players are fickle and can be in heightened emotional states so one has to be careful, not only in terms of technology, but also the psychology and thinking behind the messaging. It’s effectively a science and so we are trying to teach it as such.

EGR Technology: What was your background at Odobo and what was the link between the now defunct company and Playtech Innovation Labs?

PM: At Odobo, I was the CTO and the first employee of the company. Most of my career has been based in start-ups so I felt quite at home but I had never been given the opportunity to hear a vision, be given a whitepaper and solve it. That’s what Odobo gave me. I was responsible for the technology behind the products and so I had the ability to build the team I needed to achieve that.

What I think has come over from Odobo, apart from the POP Marketplace idea, is the willingness to not accept status quo because there was no status quo back then. We were always looking at different ways of solving problems and that’s a cultural element that has come over with us. The team is 21 people, myself included.

We are effectively what I would call a self-contained squad and around 50% are engineering, architecture, DevOps and the remainder is composed of project management and localisation experts. [As well as] designers and scrum masters. Effectively it is a start-up within Playtech. If you threw a product specification in, you would get a product out. We’re tasked with doing everything from games and game back-ends to servers and the POP Marketplace. That gives us an interesting opportunity to look at a problem and see all perspectives thanks to the diversity in terms of the role we have.

EGR Technology: What do you look for in terms of new tech talent?

PM: We will source talent wherever the best talent can be found. We don’t do a lot of hiring, but when we do we don’t really mind where they originate from. We know what we’re looking for. We’re looking for highly skilled, highly motivated and creative people and it’s quite difficult to find the right fit and not just in terms of technical skill but also the cultural fit we’re looking for. When we do find them we do everything we can to encourage them to join the team. We prefer them to be in Gibraltar, but it’s not limited to home or Spain. If we can’t find what we are looking for we will look further afield.

EGR Technology: Playtech is such a huge company, what is it like working internally with other departments?

PM: It really depends on the project and the context of the work that we do. There is no such thing as us having free rein and that would be a naïve decision in any company no matter how big you are. We have the ability to think greenfield stuff and we pitch it. We have to justify the business case and we have to show a fail-fast plan before anything gets approved.

Once we have approval, it really is just about getting it delivered. In terms of dependencies it is a big company that is around 20 years old so there are a lot of dependencies in play but there are a lot of people looking at how to reduce those dependencies because efficiency is key. I think the most complicated part is coming to Playtech and learning about everything that exists here, because a lot of tech, talent and domain knowledge is available.

Playtech Academy as a brand is going to become quite big this year. Playtech has a dedicated training group which is responsible for ensuring licensees are always kept up to date on the latest versions of all the software. The team travels around the world delivering training to new and existing licensees. I got to work first-hand with them on the POP Marketplace platform where we had to explain it to them and they would start training on it.

It makes such a difference. They understand the market. They can go right into the depth of the technology and answer any questions.

EGR Technology: What is your general outlook for egaming technology in 2019?

PM: I think everyone’s question is going to be whether blockchain has a place in the industry, I think those questions will be met with both valid and invalid answers.

I think there will be a lot of interesting experimentation with that particular branch of technology. It’s a bit too early to make any particular statements on where the technology will go but possibly blockchain could play in nicely within the regulation area in that it is publicly accessible, sharable knowledge but within a private network. We already saw an early investment last year into virtual reality and I think that will continue.

I think there will be more investment into the augmented reality area and basically across the entire mixed reality spectrum we will see some investment there. The ability to personalise a player’s experience has always been important but I believe the ability to personalise an operator’s experience is equally as important as more and more they feel the urge to differentiate themselves from each other to compete. They are going to rely on their providers to provide that level of personalisation across the board in terms of their services.

EGR Technology: What will Playtech Innovation Labs be working on this upcoming year?

PM: We are interested in tracking what’s happening with the blockchain platforms and with mixed reality. Games are an interesting problem. There is always an opportunity to get creative and solve games or build better games and so we are investing time into efficiencies around game creation.

What we’ll see going forward is that games are going to become quite focused on addressing particular licensee demands, whether they are looking for acquisition games or retention, reactivation and stuff like that. There are going to be games that spread across suites that have common features and functionalities. Creating another clone is interesting but it won’t cut it for much longer and the industry will demand a bit more.