Promoted feature: Breaching the waters of gaming

Golden Whale Productions is a software development company dedicated to developing infrastructure and scientific models for process automation to improve customer experience and retention. Its services enable companies to implement necessary technology and learn how to personalise their customer experience through the collection of valuable production information and capitalise on hidden data and patterns on their data streams to assist with business growth.

EGR Intel (EGR): Golden Whale Productions was established less than a year ago. Can you tell us what the company’s main focus is and what was the inspiration for its formation?

Eberhard Dürrschmid (ED): Golden Whale Productions was established in March 2022. After a short stealth period it became quite clear that we wanted to address the market as soon as possible. This has paid off greatly as we are already working with a few big clients, even after this short time.

It is inspiring to see what has happened with machine learning projects in the last decade and how fast the transition from academia into applied and useful products has occurred. After watching this segment out of personal interest for over 20 years, these developments made it clear that there is a massive shift coming in the way the gaming business will and must be run – and we wanted to be present and ready for that change, in the perfect position to build our part of that new ecosystem.

EGR: What benefit does having such an experienced senior leadership team lend to a startup company?

Thomas Kolbabek (TK): With the successful history of growing Greentube from small to global scale behind us, there are obvious benefits like market knowledge and access to decision-makers and, more importantly, technical know-how in very specific, gaming-related areas. Also, having already built and developed a software company to industry scale ensures we avoid some of the costly detours one often makes in building a new venture. For sure we must be aware of the success bias, especially so in a team that has been working together for so long before, but for us the positives clearly outweigh the potential problems.

As a team, we have been able to establish products like Foundation, a high throughput data-preparation and model-orchestration tech layer for machine learning that appeals to players in the market from the get-go. Getting our positioning in the market right in the very first few months of business is the most visible advantage of using the team’s experience.

EGR: Have there been any pivotal moments in Golden Whale Productions’ development so far?

Claudia Heiling (CH): As for every technology company, there have been certain points in our development that has showed the potential of our products quite clearly and further increased our motivation to create the business. For example, the moment the team came together and decided to start a company because the proof of concept was so strong; the first customer accepting our ideas and the way we go about them which led to our very first project; all the moments when data analytics really ‘finds’ something that has the potential to immediately benefit the business using the process. There are so many!

EGR: The company is billed as ‘the next-generation gaming infrastructure supplier’. How is Golden Whale Productions pushing boundaries?

ED: We strongly believe that the change to machine learning, either via support or machine-run gaming systems in the industry is so fundamental that using existing tools that solely address singular layers of the problems quite simply won’t do. A gaming supplier, and to a greater extent the operator, will have to establish a new part of infrastructure specifically constructed to reap the benefits of the advances in these technologies. Gaming systems will have to become learning systems that are designed for using the results of data analytics far faster than they do currently. And this is precisely what Golden Whale Production supplies.

EGR: What do Golden Whale Productions’ products and services offer to customers and how do they assist with customer retention and growth? Are any of your product offerings unique?

TK: What we offer could be classed as high-speed, permanent improvement products. After undertaking an initial analysis, we construct real-time capable feedback loops that completely obliterate the turnover times that are usual in the application of operational intelligence nowadays and can assist and therefore enable and improve every business-critical decision-making process in a modern gaming environment. We think this is unique and our customers agree.

EGR: How will machine learning, data science and data analysis revolutionise the gaming industry?

CH: We are sure that we are standing at the beginning of a new phase of game production as well as operation. Already, right at this very point in time, no one can deny the obvious benefits of including machine-run processes into the sector, and we will soon see a far deeper, ubiquitous and earlier adoption of machine labour in every single part of the gaming industry.

All the background systems must be made ready to work with machine-run decision-making and be designed with machine learning front of mind. This truly is a revolution in the making and Golden Whale Productions is building the foundation for these developments.

EGR: What are Golden Whale Productions’ longer-term ambitions and what can we expect in the next 12 months?

ED: Among our most important long-term goals, the most fascinating to us is the construction and operation of real-time learning systems for game and game-platform operators. The next 12 months will hopefully see us churning out a good news flow about technical achievements, new customers and strategic developments.

Eberhard Dürrschmid is the CEO of Golden Whale Productions. He founded gaming heavyweight Greentube, fulfilling the CEO role from conception to the successful sale of the group to Novomatic in 2015.

Claudia Heiling is the COO of Golden Whale Productions, focused on product, customers and operation. She has been instrumental in multiple market entries of games and portals for B2C/B2B customers played by millions of users.

Thomas Kolbabek is the CTO of Golden Whales Productions. He has over 20 years‘ experience of building B2C/B2B platforms, scaled teams up to 100x as manager and CTO globally and has industry experience in banking, gaming, real estate, IoT and IT security solutions.