Sweeping the nation: Inside the rise of SuprNation

Ten years on from the launch of Apple’s App Store and mobile gaming is showing no sign of slowing down. In fact, the newest entry to King’s Candy Crush empire, Candy Crush Friends Saga, surpassed worldwide revenues of $10m (£5m) since its launch in October, reported analyst group Sensor Tower. Online casino operators could only dream of such massive player engagement and retention on a single game in the space of a month.

Uniquely, one Malta-based casino start-up has set its sights on seizing some of mobile gaming’s vast market share with its latest gamified slots offering, Duelz casino. SuprNation swept into the Nordic casino space in 2015 and while it is certainly not the only brand to offer gamification features in the way of level-ups and trophies, the Malta-based firm believes it is the first to properly integrate real-time social and mobile gaming features into its gameplay.

“Duelz is the first real marriage you get when you first play Clash of Clans and a proper casino,” SuprNation co-founder and CEO Joakim Stockman explains to EGR Intel. “We have put these game mechanics into the actual slot games. Usually you have a clear separation between the slots and when they leave the game there is a layer of gamification.”

A new gaming experience

Although a significant percentage of gambling folk still believe gamification is fast becoming a commodity in the world of online casino, SuprNation’s Andersson and Stockman are of the opinion that other operators have failed to properly integrate gamification features into their products.

“Duelz has merged the game mechanics within the slot, and so what we have is a game where users battle their opponent and throw spells and deal damage while in the slot game,” Stockman states. Ads marketing the still-nascent Duelz product are notably void of any mention of slots games and instead tell a story of two mythical characters embroiled in a spell-casting duel in a very Clash of Clans-esque world.

“We look at companies like Epic that have done Fortnite, or Supercell that made Clash Royale and we try to find a way, product wise, to marry that [gaming] experience with the classic online casino experience because we think the traditional gaming industry is better at creating engagement with players,” co-founder and COO, Henric Andersson adds.

Andersson is not alone is his claim. Thomas Rosander, CEO for Nordics-facing gamified casino Dunder, recently told EGR Intel’s sister technology magazine he believed operators that had started adding gamification features were still far off even being compared to a sustainable, traditional game. “[Traditional games] don’t need money rewards to get people back [playing]. People come back because they love the game. In egaming I think we have a long way to go to get to that.”

A pair of EGR awards support SuprNation’s stance on innovation and gamification, with the operator winning both Innovation of the Year and Rising Star at this year’s Marketing and Innovation Awards and Operator Awards ceremonies. “I presume we won because we were convincing enough that we are really pioneers of innovation in this industry when it comes to gamification. We have the financial success to back up such a claim and that’s the winning formula,” Andersson, comments.

Finding their feet

The Duelz brand, launched in September of this year, has gained more traction within two months than any other game launch in Andersson and Stockman’s combined 20 years in the industry. “It’s a better launch than those we carried out at Betit, Betsson and Nordic Gaming Group,” Andersson remarks.

The two Swedes share a colourful career background, having met during stints at Betsson in Malta and then subsequently moving on to Betit after it was acquired by Gaming Innovation Group. Both were tasked with building a team and product during their time starting up the Betit business arm. Stockman hails his two years at Betit as the optimum learning experience for establishing his own business in SuprNation.

“I joined Betit when there was some funding but no people or products, so we had to really start from scratch. Going through those first couple of years, from building a team to building the products and launching them, you run into some pitfalls and you learn from them,” Stockman reflects.

Andersson agrees, touting his time at Betit as “a big learning curve”. The two founders came up with the concept for SuprNation during a long-haul business flight to China. What started as an activity to determine what they would’ve done differently in starting up Betit, turned into launching their own online casino venture.

Henric Andersson

Unlike many of their industry peers, Andersson and Stockman chose not to poach staffers from their previous companies, and instead remain on good terms, particularly with Betit. Recruitment proved a particularly arduous task for SuprNation, especially when considering the ever-growing level of competition in Malta. Andersson is adamant a company must have an established name on the island to have any chance of success in recruiting the right talent.

He says: “You need to have a name. When we were coming out of Betit people knew of us personally and that helped in securing those first key positions that we recruited. Now we’re a [more established] name and we’ve won awards, today it’s easier to recruit than if you’re completely unknown. It is really hard but there are always going to be people that are attracted to a start-up either because it’s a start-up and you want to be part of building something, but also technology-wise you find people who want to come in and build the tech right from the beginning.”

The company reached 23 employees in recent months, a number SuprNation prides itself on as maintaining a lean team has enabled it to focus on product development and put all its energy into one project at a time. “Like Duelz,” Stockman chimes in. “It wouldn’t have been possible in any of the previous companies I’ve worked in and there would never have been a way to get such focus on a single project. There would always be multiple projects going on. By being lean, we force ourselves to focus and then we churn out pretty good stuff at the end of whatever release cycle we have going on.”

Duelz focus

It is clear that Duelz is SuprNation’sm magnum opus, and a marker for how the operator plans to perform in coming quarters. The focus is entirely on the product, and while growing the company organically from an operational standpoint is also a crucial move, Stockman and Andersson barely touch the subject. Andersson does comment on movements in Sweden, where the operator has applied for a licence ahead of pending re-regulation to come into force in January 2019.

He says the firm is also looking towards the UK, where it already has a licence, to launch in the “not too distant future”. “We are a regulated European markets kind of operator. Then we’ll take the other markets as regulation unfolds. We’ll see what happens in Holland and Germany, and then Denmark is another market we’re looking at,” Andersson adds. But the conversation swiftly returns to product and the marriage that SuprNation is forging between traditional gaming and real-money online casino. However, Andersson reveals the company has no specific product timeline in place.

“I don’t think we’re specifically looking to launch new brands but we’re absolutely looking to continue being innovative and to look for solutions that we believe will stand out and have traction in the market. For us it’s very important to find those unique selling points because with regulation everything else is being streamlined into one experience for the customer,” Stockman notes. Duelz has managed to appeal to a wide demographic of SuprNation’s casino users, including both occasional and more frequent players.

It was relaunched as a standalone brand almost a year after the function was first made available to players on the VoodooDreams site. The team leveraged the growing popularity of the feature and expanded its offering to include more spells, more chests, more opportunity to gain trophies, and join a rankings feature made entirely for Duelz.com players. “We were barely scratching the surface of the total product we had in mind,” Stockman says.

Instead of following a strict roadmap, as many established and bigger operators do, SuprNation’s strategy is to continue to play and analyse the top-grossing video games, focusing particularly on mobile gaming and the likes of Candy Crush and Clash Royale, and then produce innovative features once inspiration strikes.

The social network

Stockman believes social interaction will be the next major move in the real-money casino world. He says slots players, like their table games-playing counterparts, harbour a huge desire to interact with other players. And the operator that properly adapts its slots offering to allow players to interact with each other will be at a huge advantage.

Duelz users can communicate in game using emojis, though. “[Its] connecting people in a social environment where you are interacting with other people by bragging and being ranked against them,” Andersson outlines. Some have argued in the past that gambling is very much a solitary past-time and the majority of players would prefer not to interact with each other, but Andersson shrugs off the notion.

“In a casino some players really gravitate around the roulette or blackjack environments because it’s a social experience and you’re socialising with the other players. Some sit by themselves at a slot machine and don’t interact with anyone, but to say that all gamblers are solitary creatures with their pastime would be wrong, but, in general, humans are humans and many enjoy social interaction. So if you look at the big successes in the regular computer gaming industry, like Fortnite, it’s a super social game.”

Operating without the restrictions of strict product timelines and lofty growth ambitions surely puts SuprNation at an advantage over its industry rivals, as the operator can invest all its energy into developing the next best innovation in the online casino space. And as the gap between the traditional and real-money gaming space closes ever so slightly, operators are certain to experience increased customer engagement as the hordes of mobile gaming folk shift their sights to the likes of SuprNation and Dunder.