Win Interactive signs first social sports deal
Nordeus - latest partner of bwin.party's social arm, boasts the "most-played online sports game in the world".
Bwin.party’s social division Win Interactive has signed its first sports betting partnership since the operator said it would commit up to 40m in two years in social gaming in May this year.
The listed operator this morning said it had struck a partnership with Nordeus “ a two-year old developer that boasts among its portfolio the “most-played online sports game in the world” “ to “initially develop” a social sports betting application.
Nordeus’s Top Eleven social sports betting game has more than six million monthly active users and two million daily active users online, Android and iOS devices, features in the top 25 list of games by daily average users on Facebook and is available on Russian social network Odnoklassniki that boasts 100m users.
The Serbia-based business was founded in March 2010 by ex-Microsoft engineers Branko Milutinovic, Ivan Stojisavljevic and Milan Jovovic. Nordeus was voted the Best Gaming Startup at the Europas Awards last year and was chosen as one of the 25 hi-tech European companies with “most potential and successful outcome” by the European Tech Tour Association.
The deal could work well for bwin.party should it align and integrate its trio of high-profile football tie-ups with Real Madrid in Spain, Bayern Munich in Germany and its most recent deal with Manchester United.
The operator agreed a deal with the Manchester club last month that will see its bwin brand become the official betting partner of English football club.
The three-year agreement saw bwin replace Betfair after the exchange operator saw its own deal of the same duration come to a close this summer.
Bwin has an existing shirt sponsorship deal with Spanish champions Real Madrid and a partnership with UEFA Champions League finalists Bayern Munich with the contract with the 19-time English Premier League title-winners integrating the operator’s odds into its official website.
“Having launched a new business unit called Win to drive our social gaming initiatives in May, finding the right partner to help us exploit our strong presence in real money sports betting has been a key area of focus,” a bwin.party statement on its corporate website read this morning.
Norbert Teufelberger, co-CEO of bwin.party, said: “Nordeus has demonstrated that there is great demand for social sports games around the world through its Top Eleven game. We will leverage our unrivalled sports brand and products as well as our online betting and gaming expertise. Nordeus and bwin.party are two European companies with global footprints and share an aspiration to become clear leaders in social sports gaming.”
Branko Milutinovic, CEO of Nordeus, added: “Following the successful release of Top Eleven, we recognised a huge opportunity for social sports betting games based on the feedback from millions of our customers. Since then, we have been seeking the right partner and we are thrilled to have an opportunity to work with bwin.party, market leader in online sports betting and one of the most known brands in sports.
“With Top Eleven, we have proven that our unique approach in social games design is highly engaging and successful. With that in mind, we are convinced that leveraging our development experience in combination with bwin.party’s expertise in real-money betting will lead to a highly successful title and establish our companies as the leaders in social sports gaming.”
On 30 May bwin.party announced details of its social gaming strategy, setting up Win Interactive, a dedicated, Gibraltar- and Ukraine-based development studio as part of an investment of up to 40m in the vertical over the next two years, with the first two apps developed by the new subsidiary going live earlier this summer.
As part of the deal it acquired a number of assets from Velasco Services Incorporated “ a separate business to Orneon “ for a fee of up to 18m in cash, of which 14m had already been paid. These assets, from both companies, included a number of existing B2B social gaming contracts and software engineering resources.
Orneon was involved in the development of Mytopia’s Bingo Island as a ‘hidden object developer’, meaning that it worked on elements of the game’s design without owning the IP of its work.
Orneon is also thought to have helped develop mobile games for Slotomania, the core brand of Caesars Interactive’s social subsidiary Playtika, something supported by the fact that bwin.party has announced that Win will develop products for Android and iOS platforms.